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rHE FLEETS 

BEHIND 
THE FLEET 

V. MACNEILE DIXON 




THE FLEETS 
BEHIND THE FLEET 



THE WORK OF THE 

MERCHANT SEAMEN AND FISHERMEN 

IN THE WAR 



BY 
W. MacNEILE DIXON 

Professor in the University of Glasgow 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



TL5G\ 
JlT 



COPYRIGHT. 1917. 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



DEC 8 /& 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a 



FOREWORD 

What follows is not written to praise our 
merchant sailors and fishermen. They are indeed 
worthy of all praise. But we looked for nothing 
else than that they would in every circumstance 
of trial and danger show themselves to be what 
they are, peerless. At what date or on what occa- 
sion in their history have they failed? From a 
fierier ordeal a firmer courage and a harder reso- 
lution have emerged, as we believed it would. Of 
this the world is already very well aware. Their 
friends know it and their foes. What remains then 
is not to praise them but to instruct ourselves. 
Our vision has been limited. We knew that in the 
Navy lay our strength, but in our thoughts we de- 
fined it as the Eoyal Navy. Till these troubled 
years the Merchant Service had for many Eng- 
lishmen only a shadowy existence. For the first 
time it has come acutely home to us that "the 
sea is all one, — the navy is all one." That ships 
are Britain's treasure, her shipping trade her 
most vital industry, her sea-faring population her 
unique possession, the sea itself her partner in 
her national fortunes, and her merchant sailors 
the builders of her empire have been facts mani- 

iii 



iv Foreword 

fest enough to others, perceived perhaps by Brit 
ons in moments of reflection, but how rarely re-* 
fleeted in the full light of national consciousness. 

"Thy story, thy glory, 

The very fame of thee, 
It rose not, it grows not, 
It comes not, save by sea." 

Let it not be said that we shall do justice to our 
merchant sailors and fishermen when the history 
of their doings in these days comes to be written. 
It will never be written. And for several good 
and sufficient reasons. Battles on sea or land 
may be described, great moments in the dreary 
annals of war. In armies masses of men, in fleets 
numbers of ships act together, and some picture 
of the great assault or the heroic defence can be 
painted in broad outlines. But the ships of the 
merchant service are solitary wayfarers, scattered 
units in a waste of waters. The adventures of a 
thousand ships, the deeds of a thousand skippers, 
how are these to be set forth in a convenient 
handbook? On each the sleepless watch, on each 
the long anxious hours, and for how many of 
them the same tragic disaster? One record is like 
another record; one story like another story. 
And as for their deeds they differ hardly at all. 
If to meet the crisis as it should be met, with 
perfect skill and perfect devotion to duty, be 
heroism, then all are heroes. A hero to-day has 
for his Valhalla a newspaper paragraph. Many 



Foreword v 

good men have walked the earth as many good 
sailors have sailed the sea without so much. Men 
do not always fight and die in the light, and le- 
gions of shining acts must remain unsung. With 
the best will in the world you cannot number the 
brave men in the world ; nor make your battle can- 
vas as huge as you please will you find room in 
it for all the gallant faces. If it be sad to think 
that they will be forgotten," it is inspiring to think 
they are so many. Because courage and resource 
and determination are everywhere, a single scene 
or act is nowhere elevated above the rest. The 
unit is merged in the magnificent total. You will 
say they form a wonderful series. It is indispu- 
table, but the historian cannot unify such a series 
or do justice to the individuals who form it. Not 
this or that exceptional act which chance reveals, 
but the compact body of its achievement, the pluck, 
the unshaken heart of the whole service is the 
impressive thing. So we may put aside the hope 
that the future will help us better than the pres- 
ent to appreciate the " captains courageous " who 
in our time have upheld the long incomparable 
tradition of British seamen and seamanship. Yet 
if Britain be persuaded by their deeds to do jus- 
tice to their successors, which will be nothing 
more than to do justice to herself, we may be- 
lieve that even though unrecorded nothing has 
been lost. In the temple or cathedral or national 
monument one does not count less essential or less 
worthy the stones that are hid from view. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Maritime Nation 9 

The Key-Stone of the Arch 19 

Sea Warfare: The New Sttle 33 

The Mine-Fishers 53 

The Sea Traffickers 71 



Vll 



OLD SAILORS 

With many an old Sailor, on many an old ship, 
Who hoisted out many a barrel onto many an old slip, 
And went below to his hammock or to a can of flip 

Like an old Sailor of the Queen's 

And the Queen's old Sailor. 

With many an old brave captain we shall never know, 
Who walked the decks under the colours when the winds 

did blow, 
And made the planks red with his blood before they 
carried him below 
Like an old Sailor of the Queen's 
And the Queen's old Sailor. 

And in Davy Jones's Taverns may they sit at ease, 
With their old tarpaulin aprons over their old knees, 
Singing their old sea ballads and yarning of the seas 

Like good old Sailors of the Queen's 

And the Queen's old Sailors. 

— From A Sailor's Garland, 
edited by John Masefield. 



vm 



THE FLEETS BEHIND 
THE FLEET 

A MARITIME NATION 

I built the ships and I sailed the ships, and they lie in my havens 
fair, 

With the sea-god's salt on their crusted plates and the green of 
the sea nymph's hair; 

I built the ships and I sailed the ships, on the slack and the flow- 
ing tide; 

Will ye match my skill in the hulls I build on the narrow seas or 
wide? 

Will ye match my men from the oceans five, or better the work of 
their hands 

From the books that are writ or the tales that are told, the tales 
of the hundred lands? 

Cease to think of Britain's naval power in 
terms of battleships and cruisers and yon begin 
to understand it. Think of it rather in terms of 
trade routes and navigation, of ship and dock- 
yards, of busy ports and harbours, of a deeply 
indented coast line, 7,000 miles in length ; of great 
rivers flowing into wide estuaries ; of liners and 
tramps ; weatherly east coast trawlers and burly 
Penzance luggers ; of ancient fishing villages look- 
ing out from every bay and rocky inlet. Built by 
nature to be the home of a maritime people, in- 

9 



io The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

habited by the descendants of sea-faring races, 
accessible only from other lands by water, every 
stone in the British Isles is fitted into a geographi- 
cal foundation. Not many of us know it but we are 
none the less children of the sea and live by it. 
"We are its captives and masters, imprisoned by 
it and forcing it to serve our needs. In the lan- 
guage daily on our lips are phrases salt as the 
ocean itself — we "make headway" and "weather 
a difficulty"; we are "taken aback," or "out of 
soundings" or have "the wind taken out of our 
sails, ' ' or discern i 6 rocks ahead, ' ' or find ' ' another 
shot in the locker. ' ' To the people who made this 
language the sea has been the "nursing mother." 
View it thus, and the Eoyal Navy becomes no more 
than a symbol, the expression of a peculiar na- 
tional life. Science may think of it as the tough 
exterior hide, the armour, like that of the dinosau- 
rus, with which nature in the process of evolution 
provides her mightiest creatures. It is in fact 
simply the glittering shaft on the string of a pow- 
erful bow, the power is in the bow and not the 
arrow. Any one can see that the mere possession 
of a fleet cannot bestow naval power. The Eoyal 
Navy occupies indeed to-day the centre of the 
picture, yet without the vast and supporting back- 
ground of arsenals, building yards, docks, har- 
bours, bases, a fleet is nothing. Behind it lives, 
moves and has its being, the great maritime na- 
tion — an organisation of extreme complexity with 
its coal and iron mines, its manufactories, its end- 



A Maritime Nation n 

less machinery and, far above all, its age-long 
tradition and experience of the sea. View it his- 
torically, and the Eoyal Navy is the heir of the 
Merchant Service, the inheritor of its fighting 
spirit and tradition. Not till Victoria's reign was 
any clear line of division drawn between the 
merchant sailor and the man-of-war 's-man. Both 
stood together in the nation's first line of de- 
fence during the critical moments of its history, 
when Philip planned his great coup, and Napoleon 
bestrode the world like a Colossus. And now that 
the fiery wheel of fate has revolved once more 
and swept the peoples into the maelstrom of war, 
history repeats itself, and the mariners of Eng- 
land from the merchant and fishing fleets are 
fighting men once more as in the old and famous 
days. 

Histories, as they have too often been written, 
obscure the vision and provide a false perspec- 
tive. Faithful chronicles no doubt of the red-let- 
ter days of battle, but how few and far between 
were the battles in our long naval wars! Too 
often the histories speak of the Navy as if it were 
a thing apart, a mere fighting instrument, and 
forget to tell us of the fleets behind the fleet; of 
the merchant sailors and the fishermen, the pion- 
eers and the builders of our sea-supported con- 
federacy. These "traders," it was said of the 
Elizabethan seamen, ' 6 escaped the notice of kings 
and chroniclers." Nevertheless it was these men 
who saved England and America from becoming 



12 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

provinces of Spain. We Englishmen forget, if 
we have ever considered and known, that in all 
their naval enterprises, and they have not been 
few, the country invariably called upon her mer- 
chantmen and fisher folk; upon all her resources 
in men and ships. The * c navy, ^aswe call it, what 
has history to say of it? That until the reign of 
Henry VIII, the pious founder of the Royal Navy, 
it was, in fact, neither more nor less than Eng- 
land's mercantile marine. As for Elizabeth's tall 
ships and proud captains, Drake and Hawkins and 
Frobisher and many another, they were stout 
merchant skippers, and of the fleet which met the 
Great Armada, near upon 200 sail, but 34 belonged 
to the Queen's Navy. In that expedition to Cadiz, 
too, which singed the whiskers of His Majesty of 
Spain, not more than 5 or 6 in a fleet of 40 ves- 
sels were men-of-war. In its palmy days the 
Merchant Navy was accustomed and very well 
able to look after itself, and not seldom lent a 
hand in the affairs of magnitude and importance. 
Trading and fighting indeed went together; buc- 
caneers and privateers abounded, and the line be- 
tween war and peace was negligently drawn. 
Peace there might be on land, but never a year 
passed, never a month, for that matter, without its 
encounters at sea. 

Through the 17th and 18th centuries it was 
much the same. Britain's "navy" consisted of 
little more than merchantmen and their crews; 
for themselves and for her they traded ; for them- 



A Maritime Nation 13 

selves and for her they fought. As the records 
show, officers of the Boyal Navy on half -pay or 
the retired list were not too proud to go to sea 
in command of merchantmen; a practice which 
continued till the crowning year 1815. On the 
"glorious first of June" 1796, the merchant serv- 
ice won his victory for Lord Howe, and the fleets 
of Hood and Nelson must have employed not less 
than 50,000 men, who learnt their sea-going and 
their fighting as fishermen or traders. Nelson 
himself — symbol let it be of the inseparable fel- 
lowship — served his apprenticeship on a mer- 
chantman, and in those days service afloat, 
whether in king's ship or trader, counted for pro- 
motion in the Eoyal Navy. As for fighting, no one 
ever complained that the men of the merchant 
service shrank from undertaking that business, 
or fell short in the performance of it. 

It was a merchant ship, the Mountjoy, that in 
1689 under the fire of the shore batteries led the 
vessels sent to the relief of Derry. She rammed 
and shattered the boom, forced the barrier, and 
raised the historic siege. ' ' To prevent all thoughts 
among my men of surrendering ye ship/' wrote 
the commander of the Chambers, an East India 
merchant vessel in 1703, when attacked by a 
French 64 and a frigate, "I nailed the ensigne 
to the staff from head to foot, and stapled and 
forecockt the ensigne staff fast up. I resolved 
to part with ship and life together." In 1804 
the East India Company's fleet in the China Seas 



14 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

engaged, beat off and pursued a powerful squad- 
ron of war vessels which contained 2 frigates and 
a line-of-battle ship of 74 guns, under the Comte 
de Linois. As for transport, how many expedi- 
tions of British soldiers have been ferried by 
British merchantmen? A fleet of no less than 90 
vessels took part in the great expedition to the 
Crimea in 1854, which carried 30,000 men and 
3,000 horses to the distant seat of war; while in 
1860 two hundred vessels transported troops to 
China. "I do not remember," wrote Lord Wolse- 
ley, "having witnessed a grander sight than our 
fleet presented when steering for the Peiho. All 
ships were under full sail, the breeze being just 
powerful enough to send them along at about 5 
knots an hour, and yet no more than rippled the 
sea's surface, which shone with all the golden hues 
of a brilliant sunshine. The ships were in long 
lines, one vessel behind the other, with a man-of- 
war leading each line. . . . Looking upon that 
brilliant naval spectacle I could scarcely realise 
the fact of being some 16,000 miles from Eng- 
land." 

During the South African War, conducted 6,000 
miles from home, almost a million soldiers were 
carried across the seas, and about a million tons 
of stores. Hundreds of trading vessels were then 
employed. To-day we may count these elemen- 
tary operations, for the fighting navy held the sea, 
and better parallels to the work of our merchant 



A Maritime Nation 15 

seamen in these times may be found in our ear- 
lier wars. 

Gradually indeed during the last 100 years, the 
services drew apart. Gradually the Board of 
Trade usurped the control of the Eoyal preroga- 
tive exercised through the Admiralty, of the na- 
tion's shipping; but the hand of war has turned 
back the leaves, and Britain's naval power has 
again to be calculated, as it should never have 
ceased to be calculated, in the broad terms of men 
and ships; the extent and efficiency not of this 
service or that, but of the assembled and fraternal 
society of the sea. In its charge to-day is the des- 
tiny of the nations. 

It is a good story, that of the British sailor in 
the long centuries that lie between us and Beowulf, 
the first seafarer and warrior in the 7th century, 
of which our literature tells. And if ever there 
was a tale to catch the ear it lies to the hand of 
the future historian of the Merchant Marine, for 
without it, without the resolution and enterprise 
with which it espoused the country's cause, the 
story were long since ended. That is the gist of 
the matter, and argument about it there can be 
none. Not for a moment is it disputable that de- 
spite all its immense resources and striking power 
the Grand Fleet could not have saved Europe or 
Britain as they have been saved from ruinous de- 
feat. Without her merchant sailors, without her 
fisher-folk in this war as waged with a cunning 
and ruthless foe, the life blood of Britain would 



16 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

inevitably have ebbed away drop by drop, a creep- 
ing and fatal paralysis overtaken her. Had her 
merchant sailors faltered, had her fisher-folk been 
less resolute, had their old qualities not sprung 
forth to meet the new and deadly perils, the des- 
tiny of the world would have been other than it 
will be. Not once or twice have they thus stood 
across the dragon's path. History, then repeats 
itself, but on a scale by sea and land that dwarfs 
even the spacious days when the Armada sailed 
from Spain, or Nelson scoured the Mediterranean. 
History repeats itself, but with a difference. The 
incidence of the pressure and the strain, pro- 
tracted, exhausting, of this war, has been less di- 
rectly upon the Grand Fleet, equal and more than 
equal to all that it has been called upon to per- 
form. The incidence of the pressure has fallen, 
as it has always fallen, upon those men who were 
not by profession of the fighting company; upon 
ships and men engaged till the fateful year 1914 
in peaceful callings ; toilers of the deep who rolled 
round the world on the trade routes, or pursued 
the whale south of the equatorial line, or dragged 
their heavy trawls through the cold seas of the 
north. 

It is no new thing then for men of the merchant 
service to man their guns and fight their ships. 
And not for the first time has Britain mobilised 
all her maritime resources. Never before, how- 
ever, in a fashion so far-reaching or so impres- 
sive. Her previous history is written over again 



A Maritime Nation 17 

but in larger characters. Never before have her 
merchant navies been called upon to support so 
stupendous an operation, to carry almost the 
whole weight of transport and supplies for mil- 
lions of fighting men. Since ships are the rail- 
roads of the Allies; since without ships neither 
soldiers nor guns can reach the distant seats of 
war; since without them Britain herself cannot 
hope to sustain her life — ships and sailors have 
been and are, as they have been in the past, the 
first and last and utterly essential element. 

None but a great maritime people, however 
powerful its fighting fleets, could have faced or 
upheld for a week the gigantic undertaking. "We 
speak of an empire of thirteen million square 
miles, of four hundred millions of inhabitants. 
"We should speak of it as an empire of ships and 
sailors, an empire of tonnage — 20 millions of it — 
carrying the weight of half the world's goods, a 
voyaging empire, in everlasting motion on the 
seas, that in days of peace serves every race and 
country — 

To give the poles the produce of the sun, 
And knit the unsocial climates into one. 

that unites in a close-wrought texture the whole 
fabric of civilisation, links island to island, con- 
tinent to continent; a prodigious network of 
travel. The empire of ships, that has brought the 
East to meet the West, sought out the far and 



18 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

foreign lands; enabled China and India and the 
Isles to interchange ideas and gifts with Europe, 
is not the fleet of battle-ships but that other which, 
in times of peace, extended in a fashion no other 
instrument has ever rivalled, and enriched beyond 
arithmetic the intercourse and resources of man- 
kind. 



THE KEY-STONE OP THE AECH 

These are the men who sailed with Drake, 

Masters and mates and crew: 
These are the men, and the ways they take 

Are the old ways through and through; 

These are the men he knew. 

The communications of the Great Alliance — it 
is their point of vulnerability — are sea communi- 
cations, and if that key-stone slips 

"Rome in Tiber melts, and the wide arch 
Of the ranged Empire falls." 

From the first the Central Powers held the splen- 
did advantage of the interior and shorter lines. 
Theirs were the spokes of the wheel, the spokes 
along which run the railways. On the circumfer- 
ence of the wheel held by the Alliance, on the rim 
of ocean, went and came all things — men and 
the interminable machinery of war. The Allied 
and far longer lines therefore on the arc of an 
immense circle traverse the sea from Archangel 
to Gibraltar; from Gibraltar to Suez or the Cape; 
from Suez to Colombo; from Colombo to Mel- 
bourne; from Melbourne to Vladivostok. Noth- 
ing less was here required than a railroad belting 
the globe, whose rolling stock was ships. And the 

19 



20 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

problem faced by Britain, as the great maritime 
partner in the alliance of 1913, remains essen- 
tially a problem of sea transport, and transport 
on a scale wholly without parallel in the world's 
history. Since Britain herself had never dreamt 
of raising an army of five million men, provision 
for the bridge of boats required for such num- 
bers, with all their battle apparatus, had found no 
place in her plans. But she had ships and sailors. 

"We have just returned here after making 
three trips with troops from Southampton to 
France," wrote an officer. "It was really marvel- 
lous work. Southampton was full of troop ships 
and like clock work they were handled. Every 
ship had a number allotted to her and a special 
signal. One ship would arrive alongside, fill up 
her holds and decks, and, in less than half-an-hour, 
she was away again. As soon as they got one ves- 
sel off her berth, up would go the signal for an- 
other steamer to take her place, and so the work 
went on. Ship followed ship off the port like a 
line of vessels manoeuvring Orders came for 94 
to go alongside. Up went the signal, and in less 
time than it takes one to write, we were follow- 
ing the rest." 

The ferrying of vast human and material car- 
goes across the Channel — an undertaking one 
might think serious enough — was in fact a trifle 
compared with the undertaking as a whole; for, 
since the recruiting areas for Britain's forces lay 
in every latitude, there fell within it the transfer- 



The Key-Stone of the Arch 21 

ence of great bodies of troops from Australia and 
New Zealand across 10,000 miles of ocean, from 
India across 6,000 miles ; from Canada, more than 
2,000 miles away, and not, be it remembered, a 
transference to Britain or France only but to 
Egypt, the Persian Gulf, the Dardanelles, Salon- 
ika ; a transference contiguous, unending, proces- 
sional. 

"It is not only a war with Germany," said Sir 
Edward Carson. "You have a war — a naval war 
— going on over the whole of the seas — war in the 
Channel, war in the Atlantic, war in the Pacific, 
war in the Mediterranean, war round Egypt, war 
in the Adriatic, war in Mesopotamia, war at Sa- 
lonika, and day by day the Navy is called upon to 
supply the material for carrying on all these wars. 
Did anybody ever contemplate a war of that kind! 
When I mention one figure to you that at the 
commencement of the war we had something like 
150 small vessels for patrol work, and now we 
have something like 3,000, you will see the gigan- 
tic feat that has been accomplished by the Navy. 
In all these theatres of war we have to provide 
patrols, convoys, mine-sweepers, mine-layers, air 
service, mine-carriers, fleet messengers." 

Owing to the demands of the Eoyal Navy upon 
the shipyards additions to mercantile tonnage 
were out of the question. With the ordinary re- 
sources of peace the vast unapprehended respon- 
sibilities of war had to be met. There was no 
other way. Besides the armies and the great guns, 



22 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

the various belligerent zones called for "hundreds 
of miles of railroad with engines and rolling stock 
complete ; horses and mules and their fodder ; car- 
goes of wood for trench making; river boats in 
sections for the Persian Gulf; motor lorries, lit- 
erally in thousands ; material and food for whole 
moving populations and their multiform activities. 

"During the last five or six weeks, " said Sir 
"William Robertson on May 12, "we have expended 
no less than 200,000 tons of munitions in France 
alone, and we have taken out some 50,000 tons of 
stones for making and mending roads. ' ' " Every- 
thing has been taken ashore/' wrote an officer on 
transport service in the East, "by lighters and 
rafts. The major part of our cargo is railway 
material, cattle trucks, ambulance vans, oxen, 
horses, mules, fodder, ammunition and troops. 
We have a mixture of everything necessary for 
warfare from 'a needle to an elephant/ " 

Think also of the coal, carried overseas to the 
Allies; nitrates shipped from South, munitions 
from North America; ore from Spain and the 
Mediterranean; and contemplate the dizzy shuf- 
fling on the high seas of these mighty freights. 
All the while the needs of peace remained inexor- 
able. The sugar and the wheat, the cotton, cof- 
fee and all the other requirements of the home 
population of these islands had still unceasingly 
to be provided. The mind refuses to calculate in 
these dimensions ; our foot-rules will not measure 
them. Let us however write down the unthink- 



The Key-Stone of the Arch 23 

able figures. Eight millions of men; ten million 
tons of supplies and explosives; over a million 
sick and wounded; over a million horses and 
mules ; fifty million gallons of petrol alone. These 
of course are merely the additional undertakings 
of war. To complete the picture one has to in- 
clude ordinary imports and exports, such trifles 
as 100 million hundredweights of wheat; seven 
million tons of iron ore ; 21 million centals of cot- 
ton — the figures for 1916. For the same 12 months 
the value of the home products exported was 500 
millions. British ships have been busy in these 
thundering years ! 

But the Allies, you will say, assisted. France 
had 360 ocean-going vessels ; Italy about the same 
number ; Eussia 174 ; Belgium 67. No doubt, yet 
these nations were nevertheless borrowers, not 
lenders. Their ships were far from sufficient for 
their own necessities, and to France, Britain de- 
spite her own searching requirements, lent about 
600 ships, to Italy about 400, a sixth of her own 
far from adequate supply. "Without our Mer- 
cantile Marine the Navy — and indeed — the nation 
— could not exist/' said Admiral Jellicoe. One 
perceives the truth of it. But the tale does not 
end there. About a hundred merchant ships were 
commissioned as auxiliary cruisers, and armed 
with guns like the Carmania took their share in 
the fighting. The Empress of Japan captured the 
collier Exford, the Macedonia rounded up the 
transports accompanying Von Spee, the Orama 



24 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

was in at the death of Dresden. Colliers too are 
needed for the Eoyal Navy; supply and repair 
ships ; auxiliaries for the fighting flotillas and the 
great blockade patrol. Extending from the Shet- 
lands to the coast of Greenland and the Arctic ice 
a wide net had to be flung whose meshes were 
British ships. And yet again in the narrow seas 
and in the defiles of the trade routes, day in day 
out, the British trawlers — fleets of them — swept 
for the German mines. 

What were, in fact, the maritime resources that 
made these things at all possible? At the out- 
break of war Britain possessed over 10,000 ships, 
and of these about 4,000 ocean-going ships were 
over 1,600 tons; of smaller ocean traders there 
were about 1,000. Add to these the fishing traw- 
lers and drifters, over 3,000 of which are now in 
Government employ. Gradually the traders were 
requisitioned, at first for military then for na- 
tional purposes. Sugar was the first article for 
which Government took responsibility, first and 
early. Then came wheat, maize, rice and other 
grains. To these were added month by month 
many other commodities of which the authorities 
took charge and for which they found the neces- 
sary tonnage. The pool of free ships diminished, 
contracted to narrow limits and finally dried up. 
Britain's shipping virtually passed in 1916 wholly 
under national control. That is in brief the his- 
tory of the ships ; but what of the crews ? What 
of the men and their willingness to serve under 



The Key-Stone of the Arch 25 

war conditions, surrounded by deadly risks. If 
we include over 100,000 fishermen, the marine 
population of the empire may be reckoned at not 
less than 300,000 men. Of these 170,000 are Brit- 
ish seamen ; 50,000 are Lascars, and 30,000 belong 
to other nationalities. There you have the abso- 
lute total of sea-farers, to whose numbers, owing 
to their way of life and the peculiarity of their 
profession it is impossible during war rapidly or 
greatly to add. No other reservoir of such skill 
and experience as theirs can anywhere be found. 
Perhaps the most valuable community in the 
world to-day and certainly irreplaceable. Means 
of replenishing it there is none. A Eoyal Com- 
mission appointed in 1858 reported that the nation 
"possesses in the Merchant Service elements of 
naval power such as no other Government en- 
joys," and in, 1860 the Eoyal Naval Eeserve Act 
was passed, by which the Eoyal Naval Volunteers 
became the Eoyal Naval Eeserve, and a force en- 
rolled which, though inadequate in numbers, has 
proved of inestimable value. The Eoyal Naval 
Eeserve man signs on for a term of 5 years ; un- 
dergoes each year a short period of training, and 
reports himself twice a year to the authorities. 
While in training he receives navy pay and a re- 
taining fee of £4.10. a year during service as a 
merchant seaman. Twenty years' service quali- 
fies for a pension and a medal. Belonging to this 
force there were at the outbreak of the war about 
18,500 officers and men available, but the num- 



26 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

ber of merchant sailors and fishermen serving 
with the combatant forces has been trebled and 
now stands at 62,500. Add to these another 100,- 
000 merchant sailors who, since they share all 
the risks of a war with an enemy that makes no 
distinction between belligerents and non-combat- 
ants, may well be included among Britain's de- 
fenders, and one begins to perceive the true na- 
ture and extent of the nation's maritime resources 
and the utter dependence upon these resources 
of an island kingdom — the vulnerable heart of a 
sea sundered empire. In 1893 the Imperial Mer- 
chant Service Guild had been established, a body, 
the value of whose services, already notable, can- 
not yet be fully calculated. To it, and to the pro- 
fession it represents, the nation will yet do jus- 
tice. For the professional skill and invincible 
courage of her merchant seamen has at length 
made clear to Britain the secret of her strength; 
the knowledge that to them she owes her place 
and power in the world. She has found in them 
the same skill and the same courage with which 
their forefathers sailed and fought in all the coun- 
try 's earlier wars. "The submarine scare,' ' said 
the Deutsche Tageszeitung, "has struck England 
with paralysing effect, and the whole sea is as if 
swept clean at one blow." To this one answers 
that the sailing of no British ship has been de- 
layed by an hour by fear of the submarine men- 
ace. If the sea be indeed swept clear of ships how 
strange that every week records its batch of vie- 



The Key-Stone of the Arch 27 

tims ! A sufficient testimony, one would think, to 
their presence, and, might not one add, of equal 
eloquence in their praise. It was assumed — a 
magnificent assumption — that a British crew 
could never fail. It never did. The Vedamore 
was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, and most 
of her crew killed or drowned. In wild and win- 
try weather the survivors, 16 in all, after many 
hours' exposure in open boats, made a successful 
landing. These 16 reached London and proposed, 
you will say, to snatch a few days' rest, a little 
comfort after their miseries. Their object was a 
different one: — to ask for a new ship. "Had 
enough?" one of the crew of the torpedoed South- 
land was asked, when he came ashore. ' ' Not me, ' ' 
he replied, "I shall be off again as soon as I can 
find a berth." "If," said one torpedoed seaman, 
"there were fifty times the number of submarines 
it wouldn't make no difference to us. While 
there's a ship afloat there will be plenty to man 
her. My mates and I were torpedoed a fortnight 
ago and just as soon as we get another ship we 
shall be off." She has her faults, has Britain, but 
she still breeds men : And mothers of men. Take 
the authentic circumstance of the vessel whose 
crew was not of British stock. They declined 
when safely in port to undertake another and 
risky voyage. But there appeared to them next 
day an Englishwoman, the Captain's wife, with 
the announcement, perhaps unwelcome, that she 
proposed on that trip to accompany her husband. 



28 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

She went ; and with her, for their manhood's sake, 
the reluctant crew. 

You may say "It is not in nature that there* 
should have been no failures." "Well, here is one. 
"Only a short while ago," said Mr. Cuthbert 
Laws, "we found it necessary to prosecute a sea- 
man who had failed to join a transport, and there 
was no doubt that he was technically guilty, but 
he set up and successfully sustained a defence 
which is unique in the annals of the Mercantile 
Marine. He admitted that he had failed to join 
the vessel, but he said that his reason for doing so 
was that his shipmates refused to sail with him 
because he had already been torpedoed six times. 
In other words, while they were prepared to take 
the ordinary sporting chance of being blown up, 
they were not prepared to accept the handicap of 
having a Jonah on board." 

The story of docks and harbours, of the loading 
and unloading of the war freights merits a chap- 
ter of its own. To understand it you must remem- 
ber that ships are of many sizes and of very vary- 
ing draught. The depths of water in the ports, 
the tides, the quay accommodation, the provision 
of cranes and sorting sheds, of available railway 
trucks have in each case to be considered. Grain 
requires one type of machinery for unloading, tim- 
ber another, fruit or meat yet another. If the 
cargo be mixed and consigned perhaps to hun- 
dreds of dealers, in various parts of the country, 
sorting sheds are a necessity. Many harbours 



The Key-Stone of the Arch 29 

provide only for small coasting craft and cannot 
accommodate large ocean traders, many are af- 
fected by tide and quite unprovided with docks ; 
others again lack quay and truck accommodation 
save of the simplest order. There is also the 
problem of dock labourers, men skilled in the 
handling of particular types of cargo. Manifestly 
you cannot order any ship to any port. Vessels 
must therefore run to their usual harbours and to 
provide the machinery for "turning them" rap- 
idly . round presents, under the congested condi- 
tions of war, a problem of extreme complexity. 
Heavy munition trains, miles upon miles of them, 
are daily pouring into the Southern ports. Great 
guns, railway trucks and engines and rails form 
a part of these stupendous freights. There are 
many harbours in the South but few capable of 
berthing, loading and unloading the largest lin- 
ers, and if we would criticise these operations, and 
free criticism of them has been, after our national 
manner, plentiful, we should understand that to 
the transport work of peace that of the greatest 
of wars has been added, and understand too that 
the shipping problem involves much more than 
ships, and requires to-day something like the 
higher mathematics for its solution. 

"Both are now one service in spirit," wrote 
Admiral Jellicoe of the Eoyal Navy and the Mer- 
cantile Marine, ' ' and never have British seamen 
united in a more stern and mighty cause." Say 
what we will, be it in prose or verse, it falls short 



30 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

of their deserving. The merchant sailor and the 
fisherman has had his share in the fighting and 
more than his share in the labours of the war. 
They took part in Jutland and the earlier battles. 
Some are in command of destroyers and torpedo 
boats, others of vessels on the blockade patrol or 
of submarine chasers; others again of transport 
and repair ships. On mine carriers and mine 
sweepers they serve; on paddle steamers and 
panting tug boats; on water ships and balloon 
ships; on salvage and escort work. They are to 
be found on trawlers and drifters and motor craft ; 
on captured German steamers, now playfully 
renamed, the Hun line, — Hun-gerford, Hunstan- 
ton; on oilers and colliers and meat ships, in the 
North Sea and Mediterranean and the distant 
oceans; on transport and repair, on observation 
and remount and hospital vessels everywhere. 
They gathered the great armies from the ends of 
the earth, they fuel and munition the Grand Fleet ; 
the Suez Canal knows them and the Eoyal Indian 
Marine and the African rivers. No sea that has 
not seen them, "no climate that is not witness to 
their toils.' J For proof that they are a pugna- 
cious breed read the story of the Gallipoli land- 
ings, where Commander Unwin and Midshipman 
Drewry won each his Victoria Cross, where sup- 
plies were daily put ashore under the shrapnel 
fire from Turkish batteries ; read the story of Car- 
mania's fight with Cap Trafalgar; of Clan Mc- 
Tavish and her spirited combat with Mowe, which 



The Key-Stone of the Arch 31 

filled the seamen of the Grand Fleet with delighted 
admiration. Read of the whalers in Sudi har- 
bour, of the attacks on Jubassi in the Cameroons ; 
of the actions on the Tigris and Rafigi rivers, in 
all which actions officers of the Merchant Service 
distinguished themselves. Called upon for every 
type of action, navigating nnder war conditions 
by lightless coasts, responsible for new and 
strange undertakings, in armed or defenceless 
craft, on the bridge of sinking ships or adrift in 
open boats, the fearless spirit of the British sailor 
meets the occasion, and as with his ancestor and 
prototype of the Viking times, the harder the en- 
terprise the harder grows his heart. 

It is good for us now and then to contemplate 
men nobler than ourselves ; to be told that volun- 
teers over 60 years of age paid their own passage 
from Australia to serve afloat, that there is at 
least one engineer — and a health to him — of over 
80 with a commission in the Eoyal Naval Reserve. 
For who is there so dead at heart as not to covet 
so springing and mounting a spirit? "I have 
taken the depth of the water,' ' said Admiral Dun- 
can in the engagement off the Texel, "and when 
the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly." 

There is something in it, this companionship 
with the sea, that kindles what is heroic in a race 
to the finest resolution. Perhaps it is not to be 
expected that we shore-dwellers should have more 
than a languid appreciation of hardships and la- 
bours indescribable and should read tales of the 



32 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

sea rather for pleasure than edification, but if ever 
a people had masters in the school of nobility 
we are fortunate in our teachers of to-day. Al- 
ready over 3,000 men and officers of the Eoyal 
Naval Eeserve have fallen in their country's serv- 
ice, and of Merchant Sailors pursuing their or- 
dinary calling not fewer. Born fighters, you will 
say, the English. Yes, but these men died most 
of them without hope of glory. 

When Captain Wicks of the Straton dashed in 
among the wreckage of the sinking Runo and as- 
sisted in the saving of 200 lives, the lookout man 
shouted to him "Two mines right ahead, sir." 
"Can't be helped," replied the Captain, "it is 
risking lives to save lives." Which is indeed in 
a sentence the daily task, whatever or wherever 
the allotted posts of these cavaliers of the sea. 
The day dawns or the night descends, to find them 
on the bridge or in the engine-room, North or 
South of the Line, running the grim gauntlet of 
murderous things that the sea, with all its grey 
ages of experience, never before has known. 



SEA WARFAEE: THE NEW STYLE 

Come all ye jolly mariners, and list ye while I tell, 

Afore we heave the capstan round and meet the Channel swell, 

Of a handy ship, and sailor lads and women folk, a score, 

And gallant gentlemen who sail below the ocean floor; 

A tale as new, and strange and true as any historie, 

Of the German law and courtesie 

And custom of the sea. 

That our merchant seamen would be called 
upon to face the fiercest blast of the storm would 
have seemed a fantastic prophecy. Look how- 
ever at the circumstances. They have been called 
paradoxical, unprecedented in the whole previous 
history of naval war. To think of it! A fleet — 
the British — of immeasureable and unchallenged 
strength, beyond debate absolute upon the seas, is 
found unable to protect its country's commerce! 
Slowly it rose and took shape, this spectre of an 
incredible, amazing situation. A new situation? 
Yes, in a way, for the weapons were new, but 
not so new as it appears. Have any of us consid- 
ered the losses of our Mercantile Marine in the 
American or the Napoleonic wars? During the 
latter we captured 440 French ships. How many 
did we lose? Five thousand three hundred and 
fourteen British vessels were captured by the 
French ! Our losses were over 40 per cent of our 

33 



34 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

tonnage! This, remember, was in Nelson's days, 
when we held command of the sea. With these 
facts in mind one is better able to judge the price 
of sea supremacy and to understand that fleets 
have never been able wholly to safeguard com- 
merce. As in our previous history the situation 
arises from the very supremacy of the Grand 
Fleet, a supremacy so complete as to leave no al- 
ternative to the weaker naval power which, in such 
circumstances, invariably resorts to the guerre 
de course. In the under water campaign we have 
a new form of attack, but it is simply the confes- 
sion that upon the sea Germany was powerless 
and had abandoned hope. No less a confession, 
too, that beneath the sea and against the British 
Navy she was equally powerless. Who can doubt 
that had the chance been given she would unhesi- 
tatingly have preferred victory in fair fight, a vic- 
tory resounding and glorious. That denied her, 
she declined upon victory without honour, of any 
pattern and at any price. She gave free range 
to her unmatched genius for destruction. Men, 
when they discussed naval warfare, viewed it with 
speculative eye as a clash of battleships in one or 
two terrific, decisive, world-shaking encounters. 
Few, if any, foresaw that the enemy, declining the 
great issue, would aim at a slow grinding pres- 
sure, adopting a kind of warfare in which the 
fighting fleets would hardly feel the shock. There 
indeed they lie in the misty North, volcanic and 
destroying powers, which any hour may release, 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 35 

and yet from day to day and month to month 
they wait unchallenged, and the enemy blows are 
directed and dealt against less formidable adver- 
saries. They rain with desperate violence against 
men whose profession was never that of arms, who 
nevertheless were they offered a fair field and no 
favour would prove themselves more than a match 
for their assailants. Unsustained by the exhila- 
ration of battle, defenceless, and in single, far- 
separated ships, their part in the drama offers 
few attractions. There are enviable occupations, 
no doubt, even in war, but who would choose the 
part of a running target for enemy shells and 
torpedoes? 

It is natural to enquire how far Admiral Ma- 
han's pronouncement on commerce destruction is 
true to-day. "The harassment and distress 
caused to a country by serious interference with 
its commerce will be conceded by all. It is doubt- 
less a most important secondary operation of na- 
val war, and is not likely to be abandoned till war 
itself shall cease : but regarded as a primary and 
fundamental measure, sufficient in itself to crush 
an enemy, it is probably a delusion, when pre- 
sented in the fascinating garb of cheapness to the 
representatives of a people. Especially is it mis- 
leading when the nation against whom it is di- 
rected possesses, as Great Britain did and does, 
the two requisites of a strong sea power — a wide- 
spread healthy commerce and a powerful Navy." 
Has the advent of the submarine fundamentally 



36 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

altered the situation? "No," we may answer 
with confidence, if the rales of international law 
be observed. If these be thrown aside there re- 
mains, until the event decides, room for nraeh ar- 
gument. 

To the most casual observer it seems now ob- 
vious enough that the vulnerable point in the 
formidable power of the Alliance opposed to Ger- 
many lay in the length and character of its sea 
communications. But the German Higher Com- 
mand, soldiers most of them, took long to realise 
it. Land power must outmatch sea power, they 
reckoned. "Moltke," announced the Tageblatt 
triumphantly, "has conquered Mahan." Doubt- 
less to harass British trade was expedient, and it 
had in the plans been marked down for attack. 
High hopes were entertained of a guerre de course 
conducted by armed cruisers in distant seas. Any 
impoverishment of the enemy is grist to the mill. 
But it was a secondary affair. And events proved 
that there was no sufficiency in it. When Von 
Speeds squadron vanished beneath the seas Ger- 
many applied her mind to the matter and per- 
ceived at length the true nature of the issue. Suc- 
cesses here and there could not help her. She 
must somehow, heroically or otherwise, cut the 
Gordian knot or reckon with defeat. Thus it was 
that the roles were reversed, and while Britain 
unexpectedly threw her weight into military op- 
erations, Germany turned her gaze seawards and 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 37 

sought to pluck victory from an element not lier 
own. 

Dimly at first but with growing clearness she 
perceived that from the sea the Alliance daily re- 
newed its strength, that the sea was the source 
of its recuperative energy, the healing well ; that 
while the seas were open it would nourish as it 
were eternal youth, that the waterways were the 
avenues to the elixir vitae, the resources of the 
world which made good even the crushing wear 
and tear of modern war. There is no better judge 
among the nations of where lie the odds in ma- 
terial things, and with faultless judgment she put 
aside any temptation that may have assailed her 
to make the heroic venture, to engage outright 
the Grand Fleet. There lay the irreducible factor 
in the situation. With its defeat the problem 
would have solved itself. But with Jutland that 
solution had to be abandoned, and with it the 
faith she had taught herself that in men and gun- 
nery her navy was more than Britain's equal. 
Another way had to be chosen. Undefeated, could 
the Grand Fleet be circumvented? Could it some- 
how be eliminated from the calculation, could a 
blow be dealt at the communications of the Alli- 
ance from which battleships were powerless to 
shield it? In evasion and circumvention, she 
judged, lay the key to the unf orceable lock. With 
the immense self-confidence that marks these serfs 
of theory, the Germans drew their plan — a ruth- 
less campaign conducted with the same pitiless 



38 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

logic, the same patience and forethought that they 
were accustomed to devote to their military opera- 
tions. Eluding the armed adversary, with all 
their great and remaining strength they would 
strike at the unarmed, — 

" God's mercy, then, on little ships 
"Who cannot fight for life." 

Were it possible, and Germany believed it pos- 
sible, to sever Britain's sea arteries, the hated 
enemy might bleed to death, slowly perhaps but 
surely. She perceived the joint in the harness 
and drove in the knife. Intimidation was here to 
play its usual part. If horror accompanied terror 
so much the better, the world must learn what it 
was to oppose an angry and implacable Germany. 
Then, and not till then, Britain realised the 
strength and weakness of her position ; perceived 
at last and with many searchings of heart her 
vulnerability, and with growing pride the peculiar 
genius of her race. So the sea affair finally re- 
duced itself into an attack upon the Allies' com- 
munications, that is an attack upon Britain's 
Merchant Marine, accompanied, since no less 
would suffice, with crime of the first magnitude. 
Casting about for weapons to be used against a 
foe unchallengeable in a direct encounter Ger- 
many found three to her hand — the disguised 
raider, the mine and the submarine, all be it ob- 
served prowling or furtive weapons, with whose 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 39 

stealthy assistance Germany proposes to usher in 
the Golden Age. With this new and triple-headed 
engine Britain was to be bludgeoned into submis- 
sion. You desire to make allowances for Ger- 
many's difficulties, and they were many. "Waive 
then the inherent defect of these engines, that two 
of them cannot be employed with humanity. 
Argue if you like that in the interests of your 
own people, the general interests of the race must 
be sacrificed ; that war is war, and that chivalrous 
war is a Christian absurdity. The Dark Ages 
would no doubt have described the use of the new 
weapons as savagery. In our enlightened times 
harsh phrases are inadmissable. There appears 
therefore to be need of some gently uncomplain- 
ing word to describe the indiscriminate slaughter 
of non-combatants, of humanitarian helpers on 
relief ships, of crippled wounded aboard hospital 
ships. Her errand of mercy did not save the Nor- 
wegian steamer Storsted, known to be carrying a 
cargo of maize for the relief of starving Belgians. 
Finally you come to Germany's dealing with 
neutrals. The world has dreamt many evil 
dreams, but this is a nightmare. You are at 
peace with a neighbouring nation. You find it 
necessary nevertheless to destroy its property. 
Wonderful! You are in fact on the friendliest 
terms with her people, to whom you owe many 
of your essential supplies, but you kill them with- 
out hesitation and without mercy — Still more 
wonderful! If they complain you become virtu- 



40 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

ously indignant and threaten worse things. It is 
past whooping! Already over 800 neutral ships, 
all of course unarmed, have been done to death. 
These are indeed martial achievements. Judge 
of the whole by a part of the most dolorous his- 
tory in the records of civilisation. " Norway,' ' 
said the National Tidende in April 1917, "has lost 
since the beginning of the war one-third of her 
mercantile marine, and about 300 of her sailors, 
and is now losing 5 lives daily and an average of 
two ships, valued at two million kroner.'' Den- 
mark has lost 150 ships, and more than 200 of 
her sailors have been killed. Do not mistake. It 
is all pure friendliness. As Hamlet says, "They 
but poison in jest." "Thirteen survivors of the 
crew of the Norwegian ship Medusa, 1023 tons, 
have been landed," runs the record of May 22, 
1917, "their vessel having been shelled and sunk 
by a German submarine. Seven of the thirteen 
were hospital cases. The Germans in addition to 
not giving them any warning, continued shelling 
the crew while they were lowering the boats. The 
bursting of the shells scattered shrapnel which 
killed two men and severely wounded seven others. 
One man had half his left foot blown away, and 
another some of his scalp blown off, while a third 
had his neck lacerated." 

Let us not imagine however that Germans are 
themselves in agreement with respect to this war- 
fare. Professor Flamm of Charlottenburg is dis- 
satisfied. In Die Woche he advocates sterner 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 41 

dealing. Fewer men of the crews of torpedoed 
vessels should be saved. Best of all would it be 
if destroyed neutral ships disappeared without 
leaving a trace even of wreckage. Then terror 
would strike at men's hearts. How charming a 
friend is Professor Flamm. For it is not enemies 
he desires to treat thus. It is not war he advo- 
cates, only an exposition of the German mind. 
Norway, Denmark and the rest are enjoying the 
pleasures of peace. Perhaps learning will supply 
us with a new name for these operations. Had 
Germany begun the war with justice on her side 
her conduct of it would long since have driven 
justice, a fugitive, to the opposite camp. Into the 
teeth of this hurricane of hate the merchant sea- 
men put forth, and every hour that we watch it 
from sheltered homes is taking toll of their lives. 
Eead the long list of officers in the service that 
are gone, and remember that beyond it lies a 
longer and more sorrowful category still of men 
that held no rank nor ever thought of fame ; en- 
gineers and deck hands, boys and stokers, so that 
in the fishing villages from North to South the 
tiniest mourns its unreturning dead. 

Of the raiders, so far as it has been written, we 
know the record. The sea is wide, and one might 
almost as well look for an escaped bird in the 
forest as for a single ship in any ocean. They 
have had their victims ; fifty of our merchantmen 
were seized or sunk before the first phase ended 
with the battle of the Falklands and the destruc- 



42 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

tion of Von Spee. There were of course escapes 
and adventures, like that of the Pacific Steam 
Navigation cargo vessel and her conversation with 
the Karlsruhe, which had information of her posi- 
tion and sent ont a wireless signal asking for the 
latitude and longitude. The operator, instructed 
by the captain, sceptical soul, refused the friendly 
suggestion. The polite enemy retorted, "English 
schweinhund. This is German warship, Karls- 
ruhe, we will you find." But the night set in 
thick with misty rain, and though only a few miles 
distant the English ship, heedless of angry signals, 
slipped away and escaped. The subsequent dis- 
guised commerce raiders could only creep at long 
intervals and under colours not their own, through 
the patrols, in rain or snow storms, by circuitous 
routes and through territorial waters. Meteor, 
under the Eussian flag, was rounded up deserted 
and destroyed by her own crew. Berlin driven 
into Trondhjem and interned. Greif disguised 
as a Norwegian ship perished in the encounter 
with Alcantara. Of these ventures, one may say, 
that they repeated tactics familiar in all our wars j 
tactics which never yet turned the scale or threat- 
ened to turn it. Consider now the far more se- 
rious menace of the submarine and mine. These 
were weapons indeed not altogether novel, the 
novelty lay in the scale and ruthless manner of 
their employment; and the ruthless policy once 
launched, three things, at first but dimly distin- 
guishable amid the confusion of so vast a con- 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 43 

flict, took shape and form. First 'that the war, 
however long the decision might be postponed, 
had entered upon its final and decisive stage. Sec- 
ond that the full strength and pressure of the at- 
tack would now be transferred from the Boyal 
Navy to the Mercantile Marine; and third that 
upon its tenacity and powers of endurance de- 
pended not the destiny of Britain alone but that of 
the world. It was to be a conflict grim and great, 
suited to the stupendous consequences which hung 
upon the issue, a conflict without the dramatic and 
inspiring incidents of engagements between em- 
battled fleets, of monotonous almost featureless 
repetitions of the same gruesome story, in which 
the enemy trusted to the accumulated effect of a 
blow dealt again and again, and yet again, in 
hardly varying circumstances, reducing with each 
successful effort the maritime resources upon 
which the fortunes of the Alliance were abso- 
lutely staked. Britain's capital — who is now un- 
aware of it ? — is her shipping, and the drain upon 
that capital, the ceaseless call upon this bank of 
national security could not fail if unarrested to 
compass her ruin. Britain, and with Britain her 
allies, would succumb to a series of stabs in the 
back. 

How is one to account for the success of the 
submarine campaign? The answer is that Brit- 
ain was not prepared for it. Why was she not 
prepared? For no other reason than that it was 
unthinkable. It is as if a respectable curate of 



44 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

/ 

your acquaintance were to whip out a revolver 
and demand your purse. You are taken by sur- 
prise for you had not thought these things pos- 
sible in your neighbourhood, and particularly not 
to be expected from a clergyman. The world did 
not anticipate the new code of morals, more espe- 
cially from a people of culture. It simplifies the 
business of the highwayman if you have believed 
him to be an evangelist. Deceived by the spec- 
tacles and the missionary manner Britain left her 
merchant ships unarmed, and was quite unpro- 
vided with mines or any other defensive machin- 
ery for her traders. By the law and custom of 
the nations merchant vessels must not be de- 
stroyed at sea but brought into port, and become 
prizes of war only if condemned after a judicial 
enquiry. From the first these provisions of in- 
ternational law were thrown aside by Germany. 
That they had existed, that civilisation had trusted 
and that she herself had endorsed them gave her 
a magnificent advantage. She took advantage — 
the most hideous form of depravity — of the 
world's growth in goodness. It was felt however 
that something might be pardoned to an enemy in 
sore straits, and even Britain made no angry 
complaint. Having discarded civilised usage as 
regards property and discarded it in vain the 
temptation assailed her to descend another step 
and disregard considerations of humanity. At 
first, as one knows, the crews and passengers of 
torpedoed ships were given a chance to escape 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 45 

death. Then, reaching the lowest rung of the 
malevolent ladder, Germany bowed farewell to 
her last scruple. Facilis descensus Averni. Free 
yourself from restraint, lay aside obligations 
moral and legal, and for the destruction of com- 
merce you have in the submarine a weapon with- 
out equal, an immoral inspiration. Unaware that 
the world had outgrown morals, that chivalry was 
wholly out of date, Britain taken aback had, it 
may be confessed, no ready or immediate answer, 
and it seemed indeed as if the new instrument 
possessed qualities unanswerable, borrowed from 
the region of fable. Only in fables does one put 
on at will the mantle of invisibility or don invul- 
nerable armour. To see without being seen; to 
cover yourself with a garment upon which blows 
fall in vain — these powers suggest magic or deal- 
ings with the infernal world. How is an enemy 
to be resisted who can attack unexpectedly and, 
if threatened, vanish like a dream? Each of our 
merchant vessels, it has been said is like an un- 
armed man walking down a dark lane infested 
with armed highwaymen. Carrying 30 or 40 of a 
crew, armed with a gun for surface fighting, and 
that terrible and devastating weapon, the torpedo, 
for the secret offensive, capable of an underwater 
speed — 8-10 knots — equal to, and a surface speed 
of 18 to 20 knots — far in excess of the average 
trader; with a radius of action extending to three 
or four thousand miles, and the capacity of re- 
maining at sea for months at a time, one need 



46 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

feel no surprise that the world rings with the per- 
formances of this submersible cruiser. The tor- 
pedo is in itself a mechanism of uncanny quality ; 
nothing else than a small vessel, costing £1,000 to 
build, it moves with a speed of 40 knots, is pro- 
pelled by its own engines and directed by its own 
steering gear. Effective at any range under 10,- 
000 yards, given position at the range of a couple 
of miles it may easily kill; at a mile it kills in- 
fallibly. Supply your merchantmen with guns 
and you drive the submarine to shelter, but you do 
not disarm it, and though it must manoeuvre for 
position to discharge a successful torpedo, if the 
missile take effect, a single shot usually suffices. 
The German submarine hates the gun behind 
which stands a British crew, and prefers the war- 
fare in which blow cannot be returned for blow. 
No Briton dislikes a fair fight, or doubts of his 
success in it, but a warfare in which he can neither 
see nor retaliate upon the foe, in which his hands 
are tied, strikes his simple and uncultured mind 
as cowardly. There is nothing for it but to run 
away, and for running away Britons are by nature 
little adapted. 

Of the capital expended by Germany on this 
campaign 15 or 20 millions at least already lie in 
the ocean depths ; but side by side with these mil- 
lions lies the uncounted wealth of the slaughtered 
ships and cargoes. Only when we perceive the 
true character of the weapon and the value of the 
campaign can .the endurance and achievements of 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 47 

the merchant sailor emerge for 11s into the full 
sunshine of their splendour. Examine the mat- 
ter coolly and one sees that the submarine owes 
its success as much to its novelty as to its inherent 
capacities. The limitations and defects are as 
obvious as the qualities. Virtually powerless on 
the surface against armed vessels of high speed 
like destroyers, completely submerged it has hear- 
ing indeed but not sight. It can obtain little or 
no knowledge of the drift of current and tide and 
is blind to surrounding dangers. Above water it 
can be rammed or shelled, below it can be netted 
or mined. Strange things have happened to it at 
the hands of ingenious skippers. Anchors have 
rudely disturbed its repose when nestling in the 
sand, and an enterprising seaman has been known 
to leap aboard a rising vessel, lay about him with 
a hammer, smash the periscope tube and deprive 
the aggrieved monster^ like another Polyphemus, 
of his single eye. Against observation or attack 
from the air, too, the submarine is wholly without 
defence. It is incapable of descending to great 
depths and rarely dives lower than 50 feet. The 
dirigible or hydroplane poised above it is master 
of the situation, can discover its presence at a 
great depth, and with ease and perfect security 
destroy it, either when it emerges or even by 
means of explosives below the surface. 

"Spotting" is everything, for once spotted 
there is little hope for the monster. A signal 
calls to his lair the neighbouring patrols and sur- 



48 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

rounded by a swarm of hostile craft he is quickly 
given the choice of ascending to surrender or de- 
scending for ever. To this mastery the compara- 
tive freedom of the English Channel from sub- 
marine depredations is largely due. Life aboard 
such a craft is not without its terrors and bad 
moments, while it creeps through channels where 
the water is shoal or puts up its periscope in an 
unlucky spot. We may be sure that black care sits 
in the cabin with the crew, a justified uneasiness. 
The end may be very sudden and of a kind one 
hardly likes to think of. Mistakes — and mistakes 
with half trained crews are inevitable — bring 
quick disaster. The deep sea pirates aboard su- 
per-submarines operating on the trade routes 
have lighter hearts no doubt than those engaged 
in the narrow seas, but exits and entrances are 
not without peril, as the North Sea depths could 
reveal. Yet their work goes forward, and the last 
sentences of this barbaric sea history are not yet 
written. 

What of the defence in this crafty and lawless 
war, and what counter measures have been taken? 
Apart from the continual patrolling of dangerous 
areas and the vigilant antisubmarine warfare 
conducted by the warders of the sea routes, the 
secrets of which none may reveal, broadly stated, 
the only present reply to torpedo attack consists 
in some form of evasion. A thousand busy brains 
are at work, but were an answer discovered to-day 
how many months would be needed to prepare and 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 49 

supply the necessary gear to some three or four 
thousand ships? Meanwhile traffic instructions 
form a separate and highly developed section of 
Admiralty work. Shipping Intelligence Officers 
at the ports, in close conjunction with the Cus- 
toms Officers issue route orders, varying with the 
needs of the hour, to each British ship outward 
bound. To neutrals advice is tendered. Orders 
for homeward bound vessels are now issued at 
foreign ports in the Western hemisphere or else- 
where by the Consular officers, assisted by men 
of sea-faring experience specially instructed. In 
addition, masters have very precise schooling in 
the arts of avoiding hostile craft. That these 
arts have their value experience proves, and of 
the various devices zigzagging has been found 
perhaps the most effective. The attacking sub- 
marine sights her prospective prey and notes the 
course. She then manoeuvres to bring her tor- 
pedo-tubes to bear, and submerges. But the helm 
on the approaching vessel is meanwhile put over 
to port or starboard and the favourable position 
is lost. Eeduced in speed and turning power by 
submersion, the submarine commander is thrown 
out. Again he manoeuvres for position but finds 
his target has again shifted her helm and escaped 
him. Zigzagging however adds materially to the 
length of the voyage and the time consumed by 
it is cordially disliked by skippers. A temptation 
naturally assails men of their breed to make a 
dash for it. Time, too, is always a consideration, 



50 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

and the risks to a vessel of less than 10 knots 
speed are not appreciably diminished by its adop- 
tion. For an 8 knot boat, and many of the most 
valuable traders can hardly attain a greater pace, 
the increase in the length of the voyage and the 
time involved balance or eliminate the advantage 
of this and other palliatives. In the natnre of 
the case there can be no immediate remedy for 
the disease. Merchant ships — that is the root of 
the trouble — are not built to resist torpedoes. 
Possibly such ships might be built, possibly a 
cure for this sea malady may yet be found. But to 
combat a new plague or pestilence the physician 
must have time to study the devastating organism 
and its peculiar properties. The study proceeds. 
The arming of merchantmen, a preliminary and 
successful measure, was necessary to drive the 
U-boat below the surface. There, capable only of 
torpedo attack, it loses half its observing, half its 
striking powers. But the true defence is a vigor- 
ous offensive, which is the business not of mer- 
chantmen but of patrol and fighting ships. They 
are at work in daily increasing numbers, they 
employ new and ingenious devices, they are happy 
and confident. But the veil is never lifted. A 
deep, gloomy, mysterious silence prevails. Where 
her submarines are lost, how they are lost Ger- 
many is ignorant. Each goes forth on its mission, 
with uncertainty at the prow and misgiving at the 
helm. All the enemy knows is that vessel after 
vessel fails to return, that they run like sand 



Sea Warfare: The New Style 51 

through the fingers. How many submarines does 
Germany possess? Probably, including the mine- 
layers, the number does not much, if at all, exceed 
two hundred, and of these only a proportion can 
be at sea in any given week or month, perhaps a 
third. Submarines, despite Germany's boasts, 
one of her favourite weapons, cannot be built in 
a day nor yet a month, and crews are worse than 
useless with less than half a year's training. The 
end is not in sight but the barometer of hope 
must already be falling fast. "If the submarine 
attack against England be defeated," said Herr 
Ballin, "it will be a miracle, and I do not believe 
in miracles. ' ' One looks forward with interest to 
the conversion of Herr Ballin to a less sceptical 
theology. His philosophical countrymen will no 
doubt supply him with the necessary metaphysic. 
As for ourselves and our lack of foresight in 
this matter, let us not be too critical. We mis- 
judged human nature, that is all. "We believed 
some species of it were extinct. We believed 
there were things of which white men were not 
capable. For this noble error, and it was noble, 
we pay the price, and are not without compen- 
sation. Since none can judge of a vessel's sea- 
worthiness in harbour, none can judge of the 
spirit of a man or race until it encounters the 
storm. And if again the superb courage and shin- 
ing of the British sailor has been proved, if we 
have been reminded that as a nation with him we 



52 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

stand or fall, we may be magnanimous, and re- 
turn polite thanks to an enemy that has made 
these things clear, who has liberated yet again the 
flashing spirit of liberty. The stars still shine 
for us above the wild weather of the world. 



THE MINE-FISHEES 

In any weather 
They flock 'd together, 
Birds of a feather, 

Through Dover Strait; 

The seas that kiss'd her 
Brought tramp or drifter 
From ports that miss'd her 
In flag and freight; 

Trawler and whaler 
And deep-sea sailer, 
They would not fail her 
At danger 's gate. 

Almost before a gun had spoken the fishermen 
rallied to their country's aid. Some few indeed 
were off the Danish coast or far North, Iceland 
way, unconscious that a more feverish business 
than fishing had begun, and heard the astonishing 
news only on their return from waters already 
troubled. Which of us knows anything of this 
community or thought it essential to our naval 
efficiency? Yet if anywhere the spirit of personal 
independence survives, they cherish it these men, 
Britons to the bone, wedded to freedom since their 
ancestors came in their long galleys out of the 
North East to harry the Saxon farmers. Take 
English and Scotch together and you may number 

53 



54 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

the East Coast fishermen at a hundred thousand, 
and their ships, trawlers and drifters, accustomed 
to voyage to the Polar ice or the White Sea, at 
some three thousand six hundred. Of these per- 
haps four hundred of the slower and more ancient 
craft, the lame ducks of the flotillas, some of them 
of outlandish type and antiquated gear, manned 
by boys and men past service in the wars, still 
drag their trawls or lie to their nets to keep the 
markets supplied. Since eighty per cent of our 
spoils of the sea go abroad in normal times, the 
home supplies can be maintained by the reduced 
fleet. The rest, over three thousand, steamers 
and rare sea-boats all, are in national employ, 
often with their crews complete u and handled by 
the skippers who know them, proud warrant of- 
ficers now in His Majesty's fleet, and working for 
the most part in groups commanded by some 
Lieutenant of the Eoyal Naval Reserve, a Com- 
modore, in his way, with a squadron admirals 
might envy. Many of the fisher folk belonged to 
the Eeserve and joined the fighting fleets, and 
practically all of military age are long since in- 
volved in the sea affair. Two things belong to 
the story — these men, whether of Grimsby or 
Hull, Cardiff or Leith, or any other of the great 
centres, were volunteers, and assess their motives 
for what you will, it was not the Government 
wage that brought them. Their fellows, old men, 
still on the fishing grounds, do a thriving business 
compared with that for which the Government 



The Mine-Fishers 55 

pays its few shillings a day. It is well that the 
country should know that the work for which no 
gold can pay was not undertaken for gold, and 
that they have held on as mine-sweepers when as 
fishermen they would have lain snugly in harbour. 
"If there have been frozen feet in the trenches 
there have been frozen fingers on the sea," says 
one. "Fifteen hours of drenching and buffeting 
were our portion that day. The vessel with the 
pull of the tackle and the drive of the engines 
keeping her like a half tide rock, never clear of 
sweeping seas. Thud, slap, crash and swish as 
they came over our bows and swirled along the 
deck, never ceasing." They were needed, every 
man of them. For it happened that in this most 
civilised warfare machines were employed with 
which, search the world round for them, no other 
men could effectively deal. But for their never 
resting labours the seas about these islands would 
have been as impassable for ships as a tropical 
forest for a motor car. Let us open our eyes and 
acknowledge the grandiosity of the German mind, 
the spaciousness of its schemes. It is not char- 
acteristic of Germany to do things by halves and 
the simple may well be amazed at the grandeur 
of her mine-laying campaign. 

No country can teach Germany anything on this 
subject. She is sole mistress of the black art. 
Before the outbreak of war she had put her mind 
to it and possessed vessels fitted to carry 500 
mines, fitted with special and ingenious median- 



56 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

isms for lowering and floating them. When her 
surface ships were driven from the seas her re- 
sources were not exhausted, and a fleet of mine- 
laying submarines continues the business with 
magnificent industry. No one will ever write a 
song on "The Mariners of Germany, " for the 
German is not a sailor. Nor has he ever under- 
stood the code of honour which prevails upon 
the sea. But as an engineer he has perhaps few 
equals, and in so far as engineering skill applied 
to ships can go you will do well to reckon with him. 
As for his mines themselves, they are of many 
patterns, strange sea-beasts with "all manner of 
horns and of bumps. " "There are some kinds/' 
says the author of "In the Northern Mists," 
"that have horns — like a dilemma; and any logi- 
cian will tell you that a dilemma is a very dan- 
gerous thing for the inexperienced to handle. It 
is better not to break the horns of the ungodly 
in this case, for when the horns are broken the 
mine explodes. Some are arranged to come up to 
the surface long after they are hidden in the 
depths, and at unexpected times, like regrettable 
incidents from a hectic past. Others are con- 
structed with fiendish ingenuity to wait after 
touching a ship until they have felt at its most 
Vulnerable part before exploding. Some are made 
to float about at random, as a malevolent wit 
flings about his spiteful jests, caring not whom he 
wounds. And others, more dangerous still, drift 
when they were meant to remain anchored; and 



The Mine-Fishers 57 

then, when they are cast upon the German coasts, 
our enemy is ever ready to describe them as Eng- 
lish mines, — never German, mark you. But it is 
a rascally people, that cares nothing for the dif- 
ference between nieum and tuum. The task of 
sweeping for all these different brands of tinned 
doom is almost as great as that of the old lady in 
the nursery rhyme, whose job it was to sweep the 
cobwebs out of the sky. The labour of Sisyphus 
was child's play compared to it." 

Conceived in the magnificent style, elaborated 
with curious subtlety, representing meticulous 
and anxious thought the purpose was no less than 
to convert the waters frequented by Allied ship- 
ping into a broad field of death. The magnitude 
of the conception fascinates one. Had it been un- 
derstood, as it has not been understood, the timid 
might have had less sleep o 'nights; but they slept 
untroubled, and none save those whose grave 
charge it was to counter the campaign can judge 
or form any estimate of its far-reaching and devil- 
ish audacity. 

It has been, let us bear in mind, not an occa- 
sional but a continuous menace, and threatens us 
still. Day and night mines are freely sown — a 
patch here and a patch there — steadily, persist- 
ently. "They grow like daisies," some one has 
said, "cut down in the afternoon, they are up 
again next morning. ' ' Let the sweepers work how 
they will the end is never in sight. Mines have 
been laid from the Cape to the West Indies ; from 



58 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

Archangel to the Dardanelles; off every Allied 
port ; in every navigable channel ; on every avenue 
of approach to these islands from the ocean or the 
narrow sea. Strewn with a lavishness that counts 
no cost too heavy, they represent an expenditure 
that runs to many millions. In one area alone 
more than 1,000 mines have been destroyed by our 
sweepers. No more necessary, no more exhaust- 
ing, no more hazardous work than theirs is done 
to-day in any waters. 

Let it not be supposed that these admirable ac- 
tivities involve a careless or haphazard disposal 
of the destructive charges. Each has been laid 
in accordance with a calculated plan and with defi- 
nite intention. There is a method in this madness. 
Take a single instance : in certain areas mines are 
laid time and again to deflect the stream of traffic 
into a channel where submarines may act with 
comparative impunity from danger. The game is 
played so that the pawn, endeavouring to escape 
capture by the knight falls a victim to the castle. 
These thoughtful contrivances demand thoughtful 
answers and result in an encounter of wits such as 
the world will probably never see again upon the 
chequer-board of the seas. But not wits alone are 
sufficient, and the pieces in the game are numer- 
ous. Bear in mind that the area of the North Sea 
alone is greater than Germany. It is not a case 
of 20 or 50 or 100 vessels. One can form some 
picture of such activities. But what are the ac- 
tual numbers? On the British side some 1,700 



The Mine-Fishers 59 

ships and 25,000 men concentrate their activities 
on sweeping for mines. The mind staggers at the 
immensity of the thing. Is any one surprised that 
German confidence stands high ; that it believed no 
answer was possible ; that it had as good right to 
believe in the success of these battalions of ex- 
plosives as in German artillery and German 
armies I 

In the early days mines were directed against 
our fighting fleet, to endanger their excursions in 
the North Sea, or to fetter their movements in 
pursuit of hostile vessels. To protect the fleet, 
mine-sweepers, specially constructed, or old gun- 
boats, built some of them as early as 1887, manned 
throughout by naval ratings, kept, unknown to the 
public, — whose gaze was concentrated upon the 
trawlers and drifters, — a vigil unimaginable in its 
range and exhausting in its intensity. Their work 
continues; but the jackals, baulked of nobler prey, 
changed their hunting ground and laid still more 
numerous traps for less wary creatures — the trad- 
ers. They, too, however are learning caution. 
There is a certain region through which since the 
war began 38,000 trading vessels have voyaged; in 
which no more than 4 have been destroyed by 
mines. "Weigh these facts and consider the com- 
pliment that fits the achievement. If you ask 
by what methods the German mines are safely 
garnered you will be told that the trawlers sweep 
in pairs; a method which seems to have advan- 
tages over that of the enemy. Pursue your en- 



60 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

quiry and you will learn that they are less 
dangerous at high than at low water ; that floating 
mines since they are easily pushed aside, and ex- 
plode to expend their force largely in the vacant 
air, are less of a danger than the anchored type ; 
that when brought to the surface gun or rifle fire 
disposes of them at a safe distance ; that there are 
other little things to be found when fishing. "Last 
month, when nearly completing the sweeping, I 
swept up five mines and came across five full pe- 
trol tanks, each holding about 51 gallons or more, 
which appeared as if they had been moored. " 

When you have gathered these facts from an 
authority, the conversation lapses into generali- 
ties. It is useless to display an eagerness for 
knowledge, the book is closed. For the curious it 
may be added, however, that mine fishing is an 
art, considerably more complicated than baiting 
a hook or throwing a fly ; that some men are fish- 
ers by nature and others despite experience, re- 
main clumsy; that the wriggle and the tug and 
the play of the fish are part of the sport, that the 
amusement is not unaccompanied by danger, and 
that good fishermen are not easy to replace. With 
these suggestions the matter stands adjourned 
sine die — that is, till the end of the war. 

Mine sweepers are of course protected, for the 
sympathetic mind will understand that a subma- 
rine which has just laid traps resents their re- 
moval. Like the ghost of the murderer, its habit 
is to haunt the region of its labours. For trading 



The Mine-Fishers 61 

with these gentry the fishers have their own meth- 
ods, sometimes more primitive and courageous 
than effective, as when the master of a sailing 
craft — it is fact not fiction — fancied himself a 40 
knot destroyer and tried to ram the enemy. Un- 
armed audacity occasionally, indeed, achieves 
miracles. One gunless trawler by persistent ill- 
mannered harassing pursuit, so terrified a Ger- 
man commander who was attaching a merchant 
vessel, that his quarry escaped. Submarine hunt- 
ing in armed craft is of course another matter 
and accounted the greatest of all great games. 
Sea-going Britons pine for it with an inextinguish- 
able longing. Lowestoft mine-sweepers hanker 
after leave not to spend by the fireside but on 
this brave sport. Volunteers jostle each other for 
the service. Admirals previously on the retired 
list renew in it all the zest and vigour of their 
youth. Alas, that after the war a pursuit which 
outbids in popularity tiger-shooting or steeple- 
chasing should come to an untimely end. 

Another submarine habit is with infinite, untir- 
ing Teutonic patience to do the work over again 
in the wake of the sweepers, for which amiable 
procedure there is no cure save an equal and op- 
posite persistence. Yet another is to lay little 
mines nearer the surface to catch trawlers en- 
gaged in fishing for bigger ones placed deeper for 
larger ships. Oh excellent, persevering and phil- 
anthropic Teuton ! 

No one in the world can teach trawler or drifter 



62 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

men, who spend less than a month ashore in the 
twelve, seamanship. ' ' Smooth sea and storm sea ' ' 
is alike to them. Grey, tumbling waters are their 
winter portion, decks continually awash, frozen 
gear, intolerable motion. Watch that short bluff 
little vessel 100 miles from any port and a gale 
rising, with her high bows staggering up from 
the hollow of the wave that hid her from sight, 
streaming from rail to rail, to plunge headlong 
into the next hollow, climb up the approaching 
mountain to encounter the smothering crest, shake 
herself and disappear again into the turbid water 
between the bigger seas. You will see no one on 
deck save the unconcerned man at the wheel in 
oilskins and sea-boots, in whom it produces no 
emotion. That wild sky and furious sea are famil- 
iar acquaintances of his, that waif of a boat rolling 
and pitching through it is his home. Skald to the 
Viking's son! Mine fishing to men of this stamp 
was merely a variation in the ordinary way of 
business. Of course the danger was vastly 
greater, but they were inured to danger. Against 
shelling they have a prejudice, for mines they 
care nothing, and among those still at their old 
trade the Admiralty prohibition against fishing in 
mine fields — a prohibition constantly disregarded 
— creates perhaps as much resentment as the Ger- 
man sowing of them. Good brooms they make 
these broad-beamed, bluff -bowed vessels, and life 
preservers too. To their presence in the North 
Sea and elsewhere thousands already owe their 



The Mine-Fishers 63 

lives. Twenty miles off Tory Island a trawler 
picked up the survivors from the Manchester 
Commerce; another, the Coriander, saved 150 of 
the men from Cressy and Hogue; still another 
brought home fifty men of the ill-fated Hawke; 
the Daisy rescued twenty men from the destroyer 
Recruit. In the Mediterranean the North Sea 
men were ubiquitous. In answer to distress sig- 
nals they appeared as if by magic. ' ' Ultimately, ' ' 
wrote one of the passengers on the ill-fated 
Arabia, "I was put aboard a trawler on which 
were about 166 rescued. . . . "We had few wraps 
and most of us lay till we reached Malta in 
drenched clothes. They were 37 hours of utter 
misery. . . . More than half the survivors on the 
trawler were women and children." 

Drudgery, and monotonous drudgery, it all is, 
relieved, if you find it relief, that any moment may 
see the end of you and your ship. Here is the 
process. "A deck hand came up the ladder and 
handed up two pneumatic lifebelts. The Captain 
silently passed one to me. After we had fastened 
them securely he glanced at the chart and com- 
pass. Then he gave a command and a signal was 
flashed to the other boat. Thus the first prepara- 
tion was made for our * fishing.' The other boat 
nosed easily alongside. There was a clanking of 
machinery and she made off again, carrying one 
end of a heavy steel cable. Several hundred yards 
away she resumed her course, while the cable 
sagged far down beneath the surface of the water. 



64 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

That was all — we were sweeping. . . . It was late 
in the afternoon that we made our first catch. A 
sudden tightening of the cable made it clear that 
we had hit an obstruction. There was just a slight 
tremor all through the boat. Everybody stepped 
to the rail and gazed intently into the water. 
'That'll be one/ said the commander as the cable 
relaxed. Sure enough it was 'one.' The Boche 
mine broke the surface of the water and floated 
free, her mooring of 1 inch steel cut off as cleanly 
as if with a mighty pair of shears. As it rolled 
lazily in the swell it reminded me of a great black 
turtle with spikes on its back." Such is the nor- 
mal procedure, and a rifle bullet does the rest. 
"There was an explosion that made our teeth rat- 
tle, while a huge volume of black smoke belched 
upward into the still air. And a shining column 
of water shot straight up through the black cloud 
to a height of 50 or 60 feet. . . . Then the water 
poured back through the smoke and the grim cloud 
drifted off over the waste of the North Sea." 

If you pursue your search for incidents you 
may meet something of this type. The gear of 
the trawler Pelican was just being hove in when 
a mine was discovered entangled in the warp. 
The winch was stopped just as the mine bumped 
— anxious moment — the ship's side. Any lurch 
meant an explosion and certain destruction. The 
skipper ordered all hands into the boat and to 
pull away. Eemaining alone on board, with in- 
finite care he worked to clear the mine, gently, 



The Mine-Fishers 65 

very gently, unwinding the gear of the winch. The 
men lay on their oars at a safe distance and waited 
in suspense. At last the mine was released and 
the skipper cautiously paid out 120 fathoms of 
line. Hardly was it done when, having touched 
something, the devil-fish exploded, shaking the 
trawler from stem to stern and half filling the 
distant boat with water. When the warp was 
hauled on board it revealed nothing but a mass of 
wreckage. If you are in search of adventure on 
board a mine-sweeper and are in luck you may 
enjoy the excitement of an aeroplane attack, with 
bombs dropping around you from the overhead 
circling enemy, or machine gun bullets rattling on 
the deck from a German battle-plane. Or again 
an angry submarine commander rising out of the 
deep may send a shell or two your way. For the 
rest it is a peaceful life, and if you escape the 
attentions of all these death-dealing devices, mine, 
aeroplane and submarine, you may arrive home 
safe enough. The odds are probably somewhat 
in your favour, but the mathematicians have not 
worked out the table of chances. You may have 
the best of it and secure quite a number of mines, 
or one of the enemy devices may secure you. You 
never can tell. Here is a transcript. 

"It was about four in the morning. This time 
of year. Just such darkness as this. The London 
Girl came down on my port side. ... I opened 
the door (of the deckhouse) to hear what she had 
to say. * Don't go near so-and-so/ her old man 



66 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

shouted. * What's that?' I said. ' Don't go,' h. 
hailed — * so-and-so — some mines adrift.' That's 
all. I was just backing into the wheelhouse again 
when there was a flash and a roar. He'd gone. 
Not enough left afloat to make a platter. That's 
it. There's five boats in line astern of you one 
minute. There's a bright light and when you look 
back there's only four. It ain't the mines you see 
that's the worry. I've seen hundreds. It's the 
beggar you can't see. Never know when it's un- 
der your forefoot. Dirty game, like, I call it. No 
sense in it. Sinking ships. Any ships. I'd never 
have believed it. Don't know what's come over 
the world." Most of us are in like case. Only 
the knights of the German Bound Table, those 
idealist seekers after grace and loveliness, know 
and in good time, perhaps, will take the rest of 
the world into their confidence. 

Against mines you cannot retaliate but against 
the U. boat you can occasionally hit back. "A 
number of trawlers," writes a correspondent, 
"were fishing off Aberdeen on a fairly stormy day 
when a submarine came to the surface and com- 
menced firing at the trawlers, making for one in 
particular — the Stratheam. The Stratheam ran 
for it, pursued by the submarine. While the shots 
were falling round, some of the crew shouted to 
Geordie, the skipper, 'Geordie, get the boat out.' 
Said Geordie, 'I'll see you in h — 11 first! Fire 
up! If she's gaun doon, I'm gaun doon. Fire 
up ! I think we hae a chance. ' 



The Mine-Fishers 67 

During this time Geordie was making towards 
another trawler, the Commissioner (armed) which 
had her gear down and seemed totally uncon- 
cerned. But, as soon as the Strathearn passed 
her and there was nothing between the submarine 
and herself, a blow with an axe cut her gear away, 
she swung round, and at the same moment her 
gun appeared. 

Her first shot missed the submarine, so did the 
second; the third hit the enemy's conning tower, 
a fourth hit the enemy's gun, and the fifth sent 
the submarine down in flames, and all was over, 
bar the shouting." 

Our Allies could bear witness to the work of 
British mine-sweepers and patrols in the Mediter- 
ranean. In one raid Austrian cruisers and de- 
stroyers attacked the patrol line in the Adriatic 
and sank 14 of our drifters. Our fishermen have 
swept for mines off Eussian, French and Italian 
ports, and of their work at the Dardanelles all 
the world has heard. Captain Woodgate of the 
Koorah has vividly described an episode in which 
he was himself the protagonist. 

"When we were up in the Dardanelles there 
were what we call three groups — One, Two and 
Three — and each group had to go up, one at a 
time. The vessel I was in belonged to the second 
group. The night we were going to make the final 
dash in the Dardanelles, up in the Narrows, we 
went, no lights up, everything covered in. They 
let us get right up to the Narrows, and as we 



68 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

turned round to take our sweeps up one of our 
number was blown up. Then they peppered us 
from each side, from one and a half to two miles. 
We heard cries for help. I said, 'We shall have 
to do the best we can, and go back and pick up.' 
There was no waiting, no saying 'Who shall go?' 
As soon as I called for volunteers three jumped 
in. I kept the vessel as close as I could to shelter 
them. I did not think any would come back alive, 
but they did come back. No one was hit, and I 
said, 'Now we'll get the boat in.' Just as we got 
the boat nicely clear of the water, along came a 
shot and knocked it in splinters. I shouted, 'All 
hands keep under cover as much as you can, ' and 
I got on the bridge, and we went full steam ahead. 
I could not tell you what it was like, with float- 
ing and sunken mines and shots everywhere. We 
got knocked about, the mast almost gone, rigging 
gone, and she was riddled right along the star- 
board side. One of the hands we picked up had 
his left arm smashed with shrapnel ; that was all 
the injury we got. When we got out the com- 
mander came alongside and said, 'Have you seen 
any more trawlers?' I said, 'Yes, we've got the 
crew of one on board, the Manx Hero/ We were 
the last out, and I can tell you I never want to 
see such a sight again. ... I thought of the three 
men in the fiery furnace, how they were preserved, 
and of Daniel in the lion's den, and I think of 
the 24 of us coming out under that terrible fire 



The Mine-Fishers 69 

and the water covered with floating and sunken 
mines.' y 

"There's one good thing about it," remarked a 
skipper who had his second vessel blown up un- 
der him, — "you take it calmer the second time." 
We thought we knew the metal of these men. We 
did, but we know it better now. Eighty of these 
skippers have been killed in action, many have 
been blown up more than once, and several, among 
them that celebrity ' i Submarine Billy, ' ' have had 
three such elevating experiences. But it makes no 
difference. They go to sea again. One hardly 
knows what to make of this type of human being. 
Perhaps the British race has no monopoly in it, 
but one wonders. Let an expert speak, the com- 
mander of a destroyer, whose testimonial, if any 
testimonials are required, has value. 

' i Only a quarter of an hour before the Admiral 
had wished me a pleasant trip. That quarter of 
an hour now seemed aeons away. The Channel 
was battering us and bruising us. . . . To climb 
to the bridge was a perilous adventure in moun- 
taineering. Here crouched three figures, swathed 
from head to heel like Polar explorers. The glass 
of the wind-screen was sweating and trickling 
like the window of a railway carriage. From time 
to time the Captain wiped clear patches with the 
finger of his fur glove and made very uncompli- 
mentary remarks about the snow. Behind him 
stood the steersman, a swaddled mummy with a 
blue nose tip, dripping icicles." All in a moment 



70 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

appeared a smudge on the horizon — "a friend 
and brother — the King of the Trawlers. " 
"They're It, absolutely It," said the Captain. 
"No weather's too bad for 'em. They're our 
eyes and our ears. They know every blessed wave 
in the Channel, not merely as passing acquaint- 
ances, but they address 'em by their Christian 
names. They'll do anything, and go anywhere 
and chance the luck. They're just simple fisher- 
men but they run the whole show and they run 
it magnificently — guns, semaphores, wireless, 
everything! They live on kippers and tea, and 
I don 't believe they ever go to sleep. ' ' 

If the Royal Navy, which has its own views 
on efficiency, says these things of them, further 
remarks seem needless. 



THE SEA TEAFFICKERS 

Quit now the dusty terraces and taverns of the town, 
And to the great green meadows you shall with us go down; 
By the long capes and islands the open highways run 
For us the pilgrims of the sea, and pupils of the sun. 

? Tis Neptune pours the wine for us, the deep-sea Muses sing, 
And through our airy palaces the flutes of morning ring: 
We traffic with the stars, we trade adown the Milky Way, 
We are the pilots of romance, merchants of Arcady. 

Unfold a map of the world and observe how 
small a part of the earth's surface is land, how 
much less habitable land, how vast on the other 
hand — nearly three-quarters of the whole — the in- 
terminable plain of sea. Here you have an al- 
most limitless expanse and without a barrier, 
here you have what was once the dividing flood, 
the estranging ocean, what is now Nature's great 
medium of communication. There are no difficult 
mountains to cross, no scorching deserts, the way 
lies open. One can sail round the world without 
touching land, one cannot walk round it without 
somewhere crossing the sea. Imagine then a road 
which leads everywhere and you have the first 
clue to the meaning of that majestic thing, sea- 
traffic. These immense regions, once so forbid- 
ding, and until a few hundred years ago, unknown, 

71 



72 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

uncharted ocean solitudes, are now the broad high- 
way of all the nations. Across them vessels un- 
der every flag, laden with all that men produce or 
peoples require, follow the plotted curves of the 
chart, and "toss the miles aside " with the same 
confidence, the same continuity as the trains on 
their iron tracks across Europe and America. 
They depart and arrive along the familiar belts 
of passenger and trade routes with the regularity 
and exactness of the great land expresses. Safe 
in times of peace from all dangers save the natu- 
ral perils of the sea, the freedom of this, the broad- 
est and busiest of all highways, open to all, used 
by all, vital to the modern structure of civilisation, 
is unchallenged. Imagine this highway closed and 
the whole fabric falls to pieces, trade expires, 
commerce is at an end, famine and chaos impend 
over half the inhabited regions of the globe. 

Seated between the old world' and the new, at 
the centre of traffic, at the midmost point of all 
the markets Britain laid holf of her great oppor- 
tunity. All the great routes were open to her, 
South to Africa, South West to the Spanish Main 
and Panama, West to America and Canada, North 
East to the Baltic, East through the pillars of 
Hercules to the Mediterranean, a route prolonged 
by the Suez Canal to India, China and Japan. 
The opportunity was, indeed, great and to meet 
it she built her merchant navy, "the most stu- 
pendous monument," as Bullen wrote, "of human 
energy and enterprise that the world has ever 



The Sea Traffickers 73 

seen." What the nations bought and sold the 
ships of England carried. Necessity gave assist- 
ance, for as islanders her own people had need 
of over-seas products and sent abroad their own 
manufactures. Nor was it disadvantageous that 
in order to build her fortunes she had to exhibit 
enterprise and cultivate hardihood. No one will 
say that the sea-farer's life is an easy one. But 
its discipline and hardships brought their reward 
in the courage and sustained vigour of the race. 
When it was a new thing the romance of this ocean 
travel took hold of the Elizabethan imagination, 
and the poets rhapsodised over " Labrador's high 
promontory cape," "the Pearled Isles," "the fa- 
mous island, Mogadore," "the golden Tagus or 
the Western Inde." 

"I should but lose myself and craze my brain 
Striving to give this glory of the main 
A full description, though the Muses nine 
Should quaff to me in rich Mendaeum wine." 

The Elizabethan poets gloried too in Britain's in- 
sularity, 

"This precious stone set in the silver sea" 

protected by the waters as a house is protected 
by a moat "against the envy of less happier 
lands." The historians have expounded the ad- 
vantages of her position. We w^ere happy in that 



74 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

we were islanders, inhabiting a natural and im- 
pregnable fortress. The sea was our bulwark, to 
us it was no barrier, to the enemy an impassable 
one. The romantic mood is, however, difficult to 
maintain and of late the coming and going of 
some ten or eleven thousand British ships has 
been productive of little emotion. As a rule the 
landsman "dismisses the sea with a shudder. " 
Rocks and shoals and icebergs and dark nights 
and fogs and the making of difficult harbours and 
winds of strength "8" on the Beaufort scale, are 
not things that habitually occupy his mind. 
Hourly our seamen were engaged in the routine 
of a perilous calling. Two thousand of them in 
times of peace lose their lives every year. We 
were not much concerned. But the submarine 
has now come to our assistance. It has at least 
this to its credit that we view our insularity with 
less composure. We see now that there are two 
sides to this blessing of insularity. We know now 
that every ton of food brought into the country 
is purchased with men's lives, and that is an ar- 
resting thought. We know, too, that if they do 
not continue to bring it we are in very evil case, 
a still more arresting and unfamiliar idea. We 
have had episodes and hours and experience it 
will not be easy to forget. There is something 
to be said for the submarine. It has proved to 
us that not to our encircling sea, but to our sailors 
we owe our good fortune ; that the sea is as ready 
to ruin as to enrich us ; that in them, not in her, 



The Sea Traffickers 75 

we must put our trust. "The one thing, " it has 
been said, ' ' that would really wake the nation to 
the vital importance of the Merchant Navy would 
be for the butcher, the baker and the grocer to 
cease to ring the back-door bell every morning. " 
Well, we have come within measurable distance 
of that and can now turn with the more apprecia- 
tion to the anxieties and trials of the men who 
have averted the catastrophes. 

"It was passing beautiful to see, and to think 
of, ' ' says the old chronicler of a sea battle in the 
Edwardian days ; "the glistening armour, the flags 
and streamers glancing and quivering in the 
wind." The beauty and the bravado which lin- 
gered on till Nelson's time are gone. Gone too 
are the courtesy and chivalry of the old sea bat- 
tles. You need not go for romance, with the pleas- 
ant sting of brine in it, to the ugly and stealthy 
story of the German submarine. A dull monoto- 
nous history from first to last, as he who cares 
to turn over the Admiralty files will find ; a bale- 
ful, intolerable, damnable repetition. The very 
extent and enormity of the record deadens all 
sensibility, so that one soon reads mechanically, 
giving no thought to the matter, however melan- 
choly. Let us set down some sentences, each a 
verbal extract from the official record. 

"The crew were mustered after the explosion 
and five men were missing." 

"While abandoning the ship the chief engineer 



76 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

was killed by the enemy's fire, and two of the crew 
were wounded." 

"Two of the crew were not seen after the ex- 
plosion." 

"Two of the crew were killed and two were 
scalded." 

' i Of the fifteen who left the ship only the chief 
officer and three others were saved. ' ' 

"While the ship was being abandoned the en- 
emy continued to fire, hitting the ship and wound- 
ing five men." 

' i One man who had been badly scalded died on 
board the patrol which picked up the boat. ' ' 

"The chief officer's boat was picked up at 10 
a.m., the boatswain who had been wounded dying 
in the boat." 

"Eighteen of the crew went down in the vessel. 
One boat reached the shore, but there was a heavy 
sea running and two men were drowned while at- 
tempting to land." 

"In one of the boats picked up twenty-four 
hours after the vessel's destruction were seven- 
teen dead and frozen bodies." 

"The submarine rendered no assistance. The 
commander looked at the men in the water, and 
shook his fist, saying something in German." 

"The master's boat with seven men kept at 
the oars for forty hours, having a heavy sea to 
contend with. The steward died in the boat from 
exhaustion. On reaching the shore the boat cap- 
sized, but all six reached land, though the second 



The Sea Traffickers 77 

engineer and a fireman died immediately on the 
beach.' ' 

"The ship was hove to in a gale of wind when 
she was torpedoed without warning by an un- 
seen submarine. The ship was abandoned by the 
crew in three boats. Two men were drowned while 
manning the boats. The apprentice who made his 
report states that the chief officer's boat when last 
seen was apparently filled with water, lying broad- 
side on to the sea, . . . The boat of the appren- 
tice which had been lying to with a sea anchor 
out, made sail at dawn and steered for the land. 
At 9.30 the survivors were picked up. While 
drifting in the gale six of the crew of this boat 
died and were buried at sea, . . . Only nine men. 
from the steamship were landed, suffering from 
exposure and frostbite." 

"At 8.40 the boat capsized owing to the sea, and 
sight of the other boat was lost. All hands (16) 
regained boat, but she was full of water. Before 
midnight she had again capsized three times and 
then only four hands were left. About 8 a.m. two 
seamen became exhausted and were washed over- 
board. A handkerchief on a stick failed to at- 
tract the attention of a passing vessel. About 
5 o'clock the first mate dropped into the water 
in the boat and died. His body and the only sur- 
vivor were picked up two days after the sinking 
of the vessel." What profit in further citations 
from this baleful volume? Multiply these rec- 
ords by hundreds and one begins to appreciate 



78 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

the prowess of the enemy in dealing with defence- 
less vessels. Gentlemen of the German Navy, we 
congratulate yon ! 

The official phraseology does not help ns to real- 
ise these happenings. The records deal only in 
flat commonplaces. There is not a picturesque 
word anywhere, no sign of emotion, an utter ab- 
sence of psychology. We are not told how the 
men felt when the shells struck the ship or the 
torpedo tore out its entrails. They appear to do 
just ordinary sensible things and probably the 
ideas that occurred to them were ordinary sen- 
sible ideas. When the steering gear is shattered 
or the engines disabled they do their best to re- 
pair the damage. If a boat capsizes they try to 
right her. When attacked by aeroplanes they 
take up a rifle, if there is one aboard, and fire at 
them, usually without much effect. But what else 
can you do? As for excitement, these men are 
not given to it. Nerve storms are not in their 
line of life. 

The look-out man under the conditions of the 
new warfare has need of his eyesight. Dangers 
overhead, dangers on the surface, dangers under- 
foot. To scan at one and the same moment the 
horizon for the conning tower of a XJ. Boat, the 
water around and ahead of him for mines and the 
sky for approaching aircraft is a task inconsist- 
ent with any form of contemplative philosophy. 
"When the ship was 22 miles S.S.E. from Flam- 
bro' Head," writes an officer, "the Second Mate 



The Sea Traffickers 79 

reported he saw a mine. To pass a mine involves 
a penalty, so I turned back and got close to it. It 
had five prongs on it, and was right in the track 
of shipping. As I had no gun to destroy it, and in 
the vicinity of Flambro ' would be the nearest pa- 
trol boat, I thought it best to put a mark on it, 
as we would possibly lose it through the night, and 
settle some one coming along. I ordered the small 
boat out although there was a moderate breeze 
S.W. with quite a choppy sea, also a N.E. swell. 
I could not ask any one to go and make a line fast 
to it, as it is a very dangerous object to handle, 
so I decided to go myself. When lowering the 
boat down, the Chief Officer and the Boatswain 
got into her, and wished to share the danger. I 
asked them to consider, and say their prayers. I 
also ordered the Second Mate that as soon as he 
saw we were connected with the mine to send the 
lifeboat to take us off the small boat, as we in- 
tended to leave her as a buoy or mark to the mine, 
and then we would advise another ship to send 
patrol steamer. We got to the mine, but had great 
difficulty making a rope fast to it, owing to its 
peculiar shape. After two failures, we fell on 
a plan to make the rope stop from slipping under 
it. We put a timber-hitch round the body of the 
mine and hung the hitch up with strands to two 
of the horns. What with the bobbing up 
and down and keeping the boat from coming 
down on the horns, and cold water, it was 
no nice job. Anyhow it got finished at last, and 



80 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

it seemed so secure that I thought we would be 
able to tow it until we met a patrol boat, so 
when the lifeboat came I returned on board with 
her, and took her on board. She got damaged 
putting her out and taking in, owing to the ship 
rolling. I now picked up the small boat with the 
other two men and got another line connected on 
to the one on the mine and went slow ahead. This 
worked all right, but I thought she could go faster 
so put on full speed. This was now 6 p.m. About 
five minutes after full speed the mine exploded 
and sent the water and a column of black smoke 
from two to three hundred feet in the air. Sev- 
eral pieces of the mine fell on deck, small bits, 
also small stuff like clinker from the funnel. It 
was a relief to all hands, and possibly saved some 
other ship 's mishap, as we met about twenty that 
night on the opposite course to us." 

A chapter on "Pleasant Half hours with Aero- 
planes" will form a part of future histories of 
the Merchant Service. Witness the experience of 
the Avocet on her voyage from Eotterdam. "The 
weather being calm and clear, sea smooth, but 
foul with drifting mines, three aeroplanes were 
observed coming up from the Belgian Coast, one 
being a large ' battle-plane.' In a few minutes 
they were circling over the ship, and the battle- 
plane dropped the first bomb, which hit the water 
15 ft. away, making a terrific report, flames and 
water rising up for 50 ft., and afterwards leav- 
ing the surface of the sea black over a radius of 



The Sea Traffickers 8l 

30 ft. as far as it was possible to judge. Alto- 
gether 36 bombs were dropped, all falling close, 
six of them missing the steamer by not more than 
7 ft. 

After apparently exhausting all the bombs, the 
battle-plane took up a position off the port beam 
and opened fire at the bridge with a machine gun. 
The ship's sides, decks and water were struck with 
many bullets — it was like a shower of hail. A 
port in the chief engineer's room was pierced 
and his bed filled with broken glass. 

The battle-plane was handled with great skilly 
attacking from a height of from 800 to 1,000 feet, 
Going ahead of the ship, he turned and came end 
on to meet her, and when parallel to her dropped 
his bombs so as to have her full length and make 
sure of scoring a hit. The ship's helm was put 
hard-a-starboard, and as she swung to port three 
bombs missed the starboard bow and three the 
port quarter by at most 7 ft. Had the vessel kept 
her course these bombs would have landed on the 
forecastle head and poop deck. 

The two smaller planes crossed and recrossed 
the Avocet, dropping their bombs as they passed 
over her. They all made a most determined at- 
tempt to sink the ship which only failed because 
they hadn't nerve enough to fly lower. 

After the first bomb was dropped a rapid rifle 
fire was commenced which was kept up until the 
rifles were uncomfortably hot. The chief officer of 
the Avocet was lucky enough to explode a rocket 



82 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

distress signal within a few feet of one Tanbe; 
had it hit him there would have been a wreck in 
mid-air. The action lasted 35 minutes, and when 
it was over and the aeroplanes flew away the 
decks of the Avocet were littered with shrapnel. 
. . . The look-out man on the forecastle head actu- 
ally reported a floating mine right ahead of the 
ship while bombs were bursting all around. He 
stuck to his post through it all, and kept a good 
look-out. ' ' 

It is the habit of nations to recall and glorify 
their past, to dwell with satisfaction upon the 
doings of their heroes, the achievements of their 
great men. These enter into and become a part of 
the national life. Perhaps the world may yet see 
another and a rarer thing — a nation weeping at 
the tomb of its honour. For with what emotion 
— will it be one of happiness ? — can the Germany 
of to-morrow recall a history like the follow- 
ing? 

French S. S. Venezia, 
Fabre, Line, 

At Sea, March 28th, 1917. 
The Managers, Messrs. The Union Castle Mail 

S. S. Co. (Ltd.). London. 
Gentlemen, 

With deep regret I have to report the loss of 
your steamer Alnwick Castle, which was torpe- 
doed without warning at 6.10 a.m. on Monday, 



The Sea Traffickers 83 

Marcli 19, in a position about 320 miles from the 
Scilly Islands. 

At the time of the disaster there were on board, 
besides 100 members of my own crew and 14 pas- 
sengers, the Captain and 24 of the crew of the 
collier transport Trevose whom I had rescued 
from their boats at 5.30 p.m. on the previous day, 
Sunday, March 18, their ship having been torpe- 
doed at 11 a.m. that day, two Arab firemen being 
killed by the explosion, which wrecked the engine 
room. 

I attach a list of survivors from my lifeboat 
rescued by the S. S. Venezia on Friday, March 
23, together with those who perished from expo- 
sure and thirst in the boat. It may be summarised 
as follows : 

Captain and crew of Alnwick 

Castle 13 souls 

Third-class passengers 6 

Crew of Trevose 5 

24 survivors 

Crew of Alnwick Castle who 
perished in lifeboat 5 

Total occupants of No. 1 life- 
boat 29 

I was being served with morning coffee at about 
6.10 a.m. when the explosion occurred, blowing up 
the hatches and beams from No. 2 and sending 



84 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

up a high column of water and debris which fell 
back on the bridge. The chief officer put the en- 
gines full astern, and I directed him to get the 
boats away. All our six boats were safely- 
launched and left the ship, which was rapidly 
sinking by the head. 

The forecastle was now (6.30 a.m.) just drip- 
ping, though the ship maintained an upright po- 
sition without list. The people in my boat were 
clamouring for me to come, as they were alarmed 
by the danger of the ship plunging. The purser 
informed me that every one was out of the ship, 
and I then took Mr. Carnaby from his post, and 
we went down to No. 1 boat and pulled away. At 
a safe distance we waited to see the end of the 
Alnwick Castle. Then we observed the submarine 
quietly emerge from the sea end on to the ship 
with a gun trained on her. She showed no peri- 
scope — just a conning tower and a gun as she lay 
there — silent and sinister. In about 10 minutes 
the Alnwick Castle plunged bow first below the 
surface ; her whistle gave one blast and the main 
topmast broke off, there was a smothered roar 
and a cloud of dirt, and we were left in our boats, 
139 people, 300 miles from land. The submarine 
lay between the boats, but whether she spoke any 
of them I do not know. She proceeded north-east 
after a steamer which was homeward bound about 
four miles away, and soon after we saw a tall 
column of water, etc., and knew that she had 
found another victim. 



The Sea Traffickers 85 

I got in touch with all the boats, and from the 
number of their occupants I was satisfied that 
every one was safely in them. The one lady pas- 
senger and her baby three months old were with 
the stewardess in the chief officer's boat. I di- 
rected the third officer to transfer four of his men 
to the second officer's boat to equalise the num- 
ber, and told them all to steer between east and 
east north-east for the Channel. We all made 
sail before a light westerly wind, which fresh- 
ened before sunset, when we reefed down. After 
dark I saw no more of the other boats. That was 
Monday, March 19. 

I found only three men who could help me to 
steer, and one of these subsequently became de- 
lirious, leaving only three of us. At 2 a.m. Tues- 
day, the wind and sea had increased to a force 
when I deemed it unsafe to sail any longer; also 
it was working to the north-west and north-nortli- 
west. I furled the sail and streamed the sea- 
anchor, and we used the canvas boat-cover to af- 
ford us some shelter from the constant spray and 
bitter wind. At daylight we found our sea-anchor 
and the rudder had both gone. There was too 
much sea to sail ; we manoeuvred with oars, whilst 
I lashed two oars together and made another sea- 
anchor. "We spent the whole of Tuesday fighting 
the sea, struggling with oars to assist the sea- 
anchor to head the boat up to the waves, con- 
stantly soaked with cold spray and pierced with 
the bitter wind, which was now from the north. 



86 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

I served out water twice daily, one dipper between 
two men, which made a portion about equal to 
one-third of a condensed-milk tin. "We divided a 
tin of milk between four men once a day, and a 
tin of beef (6 lbs.) was more than sufficient to 
provide a portion for each person (29) once a 
day. At midnight Tuesday-Wednesday, the north- 
erly wind fell light, and we made sail again, th^ 
wind gradually working to north-east and increas- 
ing after sunrise. All the morning and afternoon 
of Wednesday we kept under way until about 8 
p.m., when I was compelled to heave to again. 
During this day the iron step of our mast gave 
way and our mast and sail went overboard, but 
we saved them, and were able to improvise a new 
step with the aid of an axe and piece of wood fitted 
to support the boat cover strongback. We were 
now feeling the pangs of thirst as well as the 
exhaustion of labour and exposure and want of 
sleep. Some pitiful appeals were made for water. 
I issued an extra ration to a few of the weaker 
ones only. 

During the night of Wednesday-Thursday the 
wind dropped for a couple of hours and several 
showers of hail fell. The hailstones were eagerly 
scraped from our clothing and swallowed. I or- 
dered the sail to be spread out in the hope of 
catching water from a rain shower, but we were 
disappointed in this, for the rain was too light. 
Several of the men were getting light-headed, 



The Sea Traffickers 87 

and I found that they had been drinking salt-water 
in spite of my earnest and vehement order. 

It was with great difficulty that any one could 
be prevailed on to bale out the water, which 
seemed to leak into the boat at an astonishing 
rate, perhaps due to some rivets having been 
started by the pounding she had received. 

At 4 a.m. the wind came away again from north- 
east and we made sail, but unfortunately it fresh- 
ened again and we were constantly soaked with 
spray and had to be always baling. Our water 
was now very low, and we decided to mix con- 
densed milk with it. Most of the men were now 
helpless and several were raving in delirium. The 
foreman cattleman, W. Kitcher, died and was 
buried. Soon after dark the sea became confused 
and angry ; I furled the tiny reef sail and put out 
the sea anchor. At 8 p.m. we were swamped by a 
breaking sea and I thought all was over. A moan 
of despair rose in the darkness, but I shouted to 
them, "Bale, Bale, Bale," and assured them that 
the boat could not sink. How they found the 
balers and bucket in the dark I don't know, but 
they managed to free the boat, whilst I shifted 
the sea anchor to the stern and made a tiny bit 
of sail and got her away before the wind. After 
that escape the wind died away about midnight, 
and then w r e spent a most distressing night. Sev- 
eral of the men collapsed and others temporarily 
lost their reason and one of these became pug- 



88 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

nacious and climbed about the boat uttering com- 
plaints and threats. 

The horror of that night, together with the 
physical suffering, are beyond my power of de- 
scription. Before daylight, however, on March 
23, the wind permitting, I managed with the help 
of the few who remained able, to set sail again, 
hoping now to be in the Bay of Biscay and to 
surely see some vessel to succour us. Never a 
sail or wisp of smoke had we seen. When day- 
light came the appeals for water were so angry 
and insistent that I deemed it best to make an 
issue at once. After that had gone round, amidst 
much cursing and snatching, we could see that 
only one more issue remained. One fireman, 
Thomas, was dead ; another was nearly gone ; my 
steward, Buckley, was almost gone; we tried to 
pour some milk and water down his throat, but 
he could not swallow. No one could now eat bis- 
cuits ; it was impossible to swallow anything solid, 
our throats were afire, our lips furred, our limbs 
numbed, our hands were white and bloodless. Dur- 
ing the forenoon, Friday 23rd, another fireman 
named Tribe, died, and my steward Buckley, died; 
also a cattleman, whose only name I could get as 
Peter, collapsed and died about noon. 

To our unspeakable relief we were rescued about 
1.30 p.m. on Friday, 23rd, by the French Steamer 
Venezia, of the Fabre Line, for New York for 
horses. A considerable swell was running, and 
in our enfeebled state we were unable to properly 



The Sea Traffickers 89 

manoeuvre our boat, but the French captain M. 
Paul Bonifacie handled his empty vessel with 
great skill and brought her alongside us, sending 
out a lifebuoy on a line for us to sieze. We were 
unable to climb the ladders, so they hoisted us 
one by one in ropes until the 24 live men were 
aboard. The four dead bodies were left in the 
boat, and she was fired at by the gunners of the 
Venezia in order to destroy her, but the shots did 
not take effect. 

I earnestly hope that the other five boats have 
been picked up, for I fear that neither of the small 
accident boats had much chance of surviving the 
weather I experienced. At present I have not yet 
regained fully the use of my hands and feet, but 
hope to be fit again before my arrival in England, 
when I trust you will honour me with appointment 
to another ship. 

I am, Gentlemen, your obedient servant, 

(Signed) Bekj. Chave. 

Steamship Alnwick Castle torpedoed at 6.10 
a.m. 19.3.17. Crew rescued by Steamship Venezia 
23/3/17, and landed at New York:— B. Chave, 
master; H. Macdougall, chief engineer; E. G. T>. 
Speedy, doctor; E. E. Jones, purser; N. E. Car- 
naby, Marconi operator ; K. E. Hemmings, cadet ; 
S. Merrels, quartermaster ; T. Morris, A. B. ; A. 
Meill, greaser; F. Softley, fireman; H. Weyers, 
assistant steward ; S. Hopkins, fireman. 

Deaths. E. Thomas, fireman; — Tribe, fireman 



90 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

and trimmer; — Buckley, captain's steward; W. 
Kitcher, foreman cattleman; Peter (?), cattleman. 

Rescued passengers ex "Alnwick Castle" 3rd 
class. J. Wilson, J. Burley, G. Fraser, D. J. Wil- 
liams, W. T. Newham, E. 0. Morrison. 

There are of course records which, provide bet- 
ter reading. Worthy of the best sea company is the 
story of Robert Fergusson, a Glasgow man, but 
a naturalised American, and his companions Smith 
and Welch, who refused in the heaviest of gales 
to leave the tug Valiant, when she was abandoned 
by her Captain and crew in mid- Atlantic. "I 
wouldn't have brought her back for all the money 
in the world if the British Government hadn't 
wanted her," he said, "but I knew that every ship 
was wanted." Fortified by that thought Fergus- 
son determined to stand by the vessel and save 
her if she could be saved. "Show your Yankee 
spirit," he cried to the Americans in the crew. 
And Welch responded, "I'm for you." "I'll not 
quit either," said Smith the fireman. And the 
great liner which had stood by and taken off the 
others left them — the three men — to fight their 
way homeward, if indeed that forlorn hope might 
succeed, in the battered craft, through the worst 
weather the Atlantic had known that winter. 
Smothered by great seas, with all the tug's gear 
on deck smashed or adrift, the three fought on, 
Fergusson on the bridge, Welch at the engines, 
and Smith toiling in the stokehold, each alone. 
Then the stearing gear went, and the vessel was 



The Sea Traffickers 91 

thrown on her beam ends. Wallowing in the 
trough, it seemed impossible that she could live, 
the seas mounting to her upper deck. But live she 
did, and without food or drink, with the last ounce 
of their strength spent and more than spent, sup- 
ported by their own dauntless determination and 
that incalculable fortune which loves to side with 
a superb undertaking, they made land and the 
port of Cardiff, to the honour of both Britain 
and America, an alliance we may believe invin- 
cible. 

To read too of men like the trawler skipper, 
who, when a shell from a pursuing submarine 
smashed part of the wheel under his hands, "went 
on steering with the broken spokes," fought his 
enemy with his light gun and finally drove him 
off, makes one feel that it is something to have 
entered life under British colours. Sir Percy 
Scott cannot have had the British sailor in his 
eye when in his forecast of the character mari- 
time war would probably assume he wrote, 
' ' Trade is timid, it will not need more than one or 
two ships sent to the bottom to hold up the food 
supply of this country." How overwhelming is 
the evidence for this timidity. The timidity of 
Captain Lane for instance, who continued to fight 
the enemy submarine amid the flames which its 
shell fire had produced ; beat off his pursuer, and 
when the crew were safely in the boats and the 
vessel in a sinking condition, with the assistance 
of the engineer himself beached his ship, and 



92 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

finally subduing the flames, repaired the damages 
and resumed his voyage. The timidity of the 
Parslows, father and son — the father, killed at 
the wheel, succeeded by the son, who resolutely 
held on his course and saved his vessel. The 
timidity of Captain Pillar, who saved seventy 
men of the Formidable by incomparable seaman- 
ship and a daring manoeuvre in a furious gale, or 
of Captain Walker of the transport Mercian, an 
unarmed vessel, crowded with troops, who kept 
on his way, undeterred by the storm of shells from 
the enemy, though his decks were full of dead 
and wounded. The timidity aboard the Thordis, 
a heavily laden collier, attacked when head to 
wind and sea, an easy victim, capable of no more 
than 3 knots, whose Captain put over his helm, 
and crashing into the astonished enemy sent her 
to the bottom. There is the story of the timid 
skipper of the Wandle, another collier, who, blown 
off his feet on the bridge by the concussion of 
a shell, gave back shot for shot, sank his enemy, 
and in his little vessel, her flag still flying, made 
a triumphal progress up the Thames with her 
rent bulwarks as proof of her timidity; the si- 
rens on the tugs ahead and astern advertising 
it; the bells ringing at Greenwich Hospital, and 
riverside London cheering itself hoarse for joy 
of it. There is the story of the timid Captain 
Kinneir, who, ordered to stop by a German 
cruiser, north of Magellan Straits, answered the 
order by driving his ship, the Ortega, right into 



The Sea Traffickers 93 

Nelson's Straits, the most gloomy ocean defile in 
the world, without anchorage, an unchartered 
channel never before attempted, which no seaman 
knows or desires to know, and so baffled his pur- 
suers who dared not follow. You cannot capture 
the record for it outruns description. These timid 
captains, in the spirit of the old English, fight 
till none is left to fight. 

Then there are the timid apprentices and deck- 
hands and engineers. The seas swarm with them, 
they are to be found on every cargo tank and 
collier and transport and ocean liner. You can- 
not rid yourself of these nervous sea-farers. 
There was Davies, second officer of the Armen- 
ian, who saved thirty-five of her crew ; and Heth- 
erington of the Jacona, who in somewhat similar 
circumstances swam from the sinking ship to a 
drifting boat, into which he dragged his shipmates 
clinging to drifting wreckage. There were the 
engineers of the Southport, at the Carolines, 
seized by the German corvette Geier. Left with 
her machinery dismantled that she might serve 
as an enemy store ship, these men in twelve days 
of feverish work replaced the essential parts, and 
setting sail made Brisbane, 2,000 miles away, in 
a ship capable only of steaming one way. There 
was the half hour's work of three men, Engineers 
Wilson, East and the mate Gooderham, of a fish- 
ing boat mined in the North Sea, the first of whom, 
heedless of the scalding steam in the damaged 
engine-room, rushed in and after desperate exer- 



94 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

tions plugged the hole caused by the explosion, 
while East dragged from an almost hopeless po- 
sition in the bunker the imprisoned stoker, and 
Gooderham swung a boat over and rescued under 
the overhanging side of another trawler, mined at 
the same time, seven of her crew. Look through 
the long list of Admiralty rewards for timidity 
in rescue work, in battles against odds, in sea- 
manship. Germany, hanging on the arm of the 
false jade to whom she has sold herself, the creed 
of f rightfulness, was very sure. 

"Swept clear of ships," was her description of 
the Channel. Pathetic delusion ! Why it is more 
like a maritime fair. Never was there such a 
bustle of shipping since the world was made. An 
average of over a hundred merchant ships a day 
pass through the narrow gateway guarded by the 
Dover patrol. Motor boats, flocks of them ; scores 
of traders at anchor in the Downs; busy trans- 
ports on their way to Havre ; up to windward a 
cluster of mine-sweepers ; down to leeward a line 
of lean destroyers. It is night and day with them 
as with all the ships, through every changing mood 
of the Channel — rain, storm, snow blizzards, sun- 
shine and sweet airs or "wind like a whetted 
knife." For this is the gate of all the gates, the 
vital trade route, and from Foreland to Start, 
from Start to Lizard in three years of war the 
German fleet has not seen these famous head- 
lands ! Very busy, but very much at home, are 
the British vessels in that loner sea lane. Talka 



The Sea Traffickers 95 

tive too, for the gossip never ceases. Hoarse meg- 
aphone conversations, rocket and semaphore talk, 
wireless chatter without end. Within a few hours 
steaming of the lively scene, when you may count 
as many as fifty vessels within sight at one time, 
lies the magnificent German fleet, for it is magnifi- 
cent, save the British the finest the world has ever 
seen, equipped with all the most destructive en- 
gines the heart of man could devise. Hindenburg 
and his devoted divisions suffer terrible things 
under the fire of 4,000 British guns, discharging 
200,000 tons of shells within the passage of a few 
short weeks. Admirals Von Scheer and Von Hip- 
per pace their quarter decks and take no notice. 
They know that these guns, these shells, and the 
troops behind them can enter France only by 
water. 

Here surely was their opportunity, and yet only 
in the outer seas, and there only by furtive at- 
tacks, is the transport upon which all depends any- 
where impeded. That the bridge from England 
to France stands firm, that the Channel is no 
sundering gulf, but as it were solid land, may seem 
to us as natural as it is essential, but that it does 
stand firm is not merely, if we ponder it, a wonder 
in itself, it is perhaps the greatest of the wonders 
that we have witnessed in these amazing years. 
By the navy that vital area, that great and indis- 
pensable bridge has been securely held, and when 
we say "the navy" let us now and always mean 
nothing short of British ships and sailors any- 



96 The Fleets Behind the Fleet 

where, everywhere, in all the range and variety of 
their sea-faring activities. Let us separate them 
neither in our thoughts nor our affections, and 
say of our merchant sailors and fishermen as of 
the Eoyal Navy that — what was expected of them 
they accomplished, what was required of them 
they gave ; if courage it was there, if skill it was 
always forthcoming, if death they offered their 
lives freely. There were among them no strikers 
or conscientious objectors. In all the virtues that 
mankind have held honourable they need not fear 
comparison either with their own ancestors or with 
their adversaries. From "the stoker who put his 
soul into his shovel" to the Captain who was the 
last to leave his ship they upheld beyond reproach 
the chivalry of the great sea tradition. And if 
we say that the last chapter of the Merchant Sail- 
or 's history, tested by any standard you care to 
apply, is nobler than any previously written, we 
do him no more than justice, and yet ask for him 
universal and wondering admiration. 



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Books To Be Read Nou 

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME ByJohnBucha, 

"Mr. Buchan's account is a clear and brilliant presentation of the whole vasl 
manoeuver and its tactical and strategic development through all four stages."- 
Springfield Republican. Illustrated. 12mo. Net $1.5* 

THE GERMAN FURY IN BELGIUM ByL.Mokveh 

"Some of the most brilliant reporting of all times was done by a few quiet indi- 
viduals. . . . Among the men who did the most brilliant work, Mokveld of the 
Amsterdam Tijd stands foremost." — Dr. Willem Hendrik Van Loon. 

12mo. Net. $1.00 
THE GERMAN TERROR IN BELGIUM By Arnold J. Toynbe< 

"From the facts he places before his readers, it appears conclusive that the horror 
were perpetrated systematically, deliberately, under orders, upon a people whos •* 
country was invaded without just cause. — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 

8vo. Net $1.0t 
THE LAND O/DEEPENING SHADOW: gf ^AR NY " **D. Thomas Carta 
Revealing the Germany of fact in place of the Germany of tradition; telling th* 
truth about Germany-in-the-third-year-of-the-war. 12mo. Net $1.5C 

I ACCUSE ! (J'ACCUSE!) By A German 

An arraignment of Germany by a German of the German War Party. Facts every 
neutral should know. 12mo. Net $1.50 

THE REP CROSS IN FRANCE By Granville Barker 

The popular playwright-author at his best; delightfully introduced by the Hon. 
Joseph A. Choate. 12mo. Net $1.00 

SOULS IN KHAKI By Arthur E. Copping 

(With a foreword by General Bramwell Booth.) A personal investigation into 
the spiritual experiences and sources of heroism among the lads on the firing line. 

12mo. Net $1.00 
BETWEEN ST, DENNIS AND ST, GEORGE ByFordMadoxHueffer 
A discussion of Germany's responsibility and France's great mission — with the 
"respects" of the author to George Bernard Shaw. 12mo. Net $1.00 

ONE YOUNG MAN Edited by J. E. Hodder Williams 

The experiences of a young clerk who enlisted in 1914, fought for nearly two 
years, was severely wounded, and is now on his way back to his desk. 

12mo. Net $0.75 
WHEN BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT By Ford Madox Hueffer 

This powerful, deep-probing exposition of German ideals is by an accepted 
authority. 12mo. Net $1.00 

GERMAN BARBARISM By Leon Maccas 

A detailed picture of the German atrocities — indisputable and amazing — based en- 
tirely on documentary evidence. By a neutral. 12mo. Net $1.00 

COLLECTED DIPLOMATIC DOCUMENTS 

The original diplomatic papers of the various European nations at the outbreak! 
of the war. Quarto. Net $1.00 'j 

THE ROAD TO LIEGE By M. Gustave Somvilh 

The work of the German "destruction squads" just over the German frontier. 
(From German evidence.) 12mo. Net $1.00 i 

MY HOME IN THE FIELD OF HONOUR By Frances Wilson Huard 

The simple, intimate, classic narrative which has taken rank as one of the fe\v ! 
distinguished books produced since the outbreak of the war. 

Illustrated. 12mo. Net $1.3g - 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Publishers New York 

e r i ca for HODDER & STOUGHTON 



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